English Language Facts
English Language Facts

46 Bizarre English Language Facts

Karin Lehnardt
By Karin Lehnardt, Senior Writer
Published June 25, 2018Updated December 27, 2024
  • A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the language. For example, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."[23]
  • The term "lynch" is derived from the name of Colonel Charles Lynch (1736-96), a Virginia landowner who began to hold illegal trials in his backyard in 1790.[19]
  • An ambigram is a word that looks the same from various orientations. For example, the word "swims" will be the same even when turned upside down.[4]
  • If you wrote out all the numbers (e.g. one, two, three . . . ), you would not use the letter "b" until the word "billion."[15]
    • Strange English Facts
    The longest word in the English language is not "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"
  • The longest word in the English language is 45 letters long: "Pneumonoultramicroscopic-silicovolcanoconiosis." It is the scientific name for a type of lung disease.[2]
  • Almost all of the 100 most frequently used words in English come from Old English. These words include, "a," "the," "and," pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions (from, with, when), and the various forms of the verbs "to have" and "to be."[14]
  • Words have a lifespan of anywhere between 1,000 and 20,000 years. More commonly used words tend to last longer.[14]
  • Those who read fiction have a larger vocabulary than those who do not. Fiction usually contains a wider range of vocabulary than nonfiction does.[25]
  • The letter "e" is the most commonly used letter in the English language.[30]
  • Only one word in all of English has the letters X, Y, and Z in order: Hydroxyzine. This unique word is a type of medicine that prevents sneezing and anxiety.[12]
  • Though not commonly used, the day after tomorrow is called "overmorrow."[22]
  • English is the most commonly used language in the sciences.[18]
  • The 1066 Norman Conquest drastically changed the English language. When the Normans (French) conquered England, they brought with them thousands of French words associated with the church, court systems, and government, such as baron, noble, parliament, governor, banquet.[18]
    • Norman Conquest Fact
    The Norman Conquest changed the English language forever
  • English is not the official language of the United States.[32]
  • An anagram is a rearrangement of the letters in a word or phrase to form a different word or phrase. For example, the word "stifle" is an anagram of "itself."[27]
  • There are only five words in the English language that consist of all vowels (aa, ae, ai, oe, and eau).[27]
  • The word "queue" sounds the same even if the last four letters are removed. Before it meant "line," a queue meant the tail of a beast in medieval pictures and designs.[12]
  • The longest common word with all the letters in alphabetical order is "almost."[27]
  • More English words begin with the letter "s" than any other letter.[15]
    • Fun English Facts
    It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly 1 million words, but this is a very rough estimate
  • According to University of Warwick researchers, the top 10 funniest words in the English language are booty, tit, booby, hooter, nitwit, twit, waddle, tinkle, bebop, and egghead.[17]
  • The word "good" has the most synonyms of any other word in the English language, at 380.[27]
  • Yes, there is a word in English meaning "shapely buttocks." That word is "callipygian." It is from the Greek "kallipygos," meaning kallos (beauty) + pyge (buttocks).[6]
  • The longest common word with no vowels is "rhythms."[27]
  • The most commonly misused word in the English language is "ironic." Irony is often confused with sarcasm, coincidence, or paradox.[16]
  • "Rhinorrhea" is the medical term for "runny nose."[26]
  • The first number spelled out that contains an "a" is one thousand.[27]
  • China has more English speakers than the United States.[14]
  • The English words "moose," opossum," "pecan," "raccoon," "skunk," and "squash" originated from the now-extinct language of the Algonquian people. They were a native tribe that lived at the site of the earliest English colony on what is now Roanoke Island in the United States.[31]
  • The opposite of "sparkle" is "darkle."[9]
    • Interesting English Facts
    A shorter version is "Ev"
  • The word “whatever” consistently ranks as the most annoying English word.[27]
  • The language that is most closely related to English is Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken in parts of the Netherlands and Germany.[1][2]
  • The longest word you can make using only four letters is "senseless."[27]
  • The word "good-bye" is a contraction of "God be with ye."[13]
  • Capitonyms are words which change their meaning if the first letter is capitalized. For example: Turkey (the country) and turkey (the bird).[14]
  • The most commonly used noun in the English language is the word "time."[3]
  • The plural of cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac.[8]
  • The word "embox" means to "place something in a box."[11]
  • The chess term “checkmate” is from a 14th-century Arabic phrase, “shah mat," meaning “the king is helpless.”[7]
  • A "blatteroon" is a senseless blabber or boaster.[5]
  • An aptonym (or euonym) is a personal name that is appropriate to their job, such as Liz Potter, Katherine Barber, or Martin Shovel.[20]
  • The ampersand used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet.[18]
  • The synonym for the word synonym is poecilonym. It's from the Greek "poikilos" (various) + "-onym" (name).[24]
  • Some English words exist only in plural form, such as binoculars, scissors, pants, and knickers.[21]
  • A "tittynope" is a small quantity of food left over on a plate or a small amount of drink at the bottom of a cup.[29]
  • The word sofa is from the Arabic word "suffah," which means "bench."[28]
  • The word "duck" comes from Old English "dūce," meaning "diver" or "a ducker."[10]
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