Отправлено: 22.01.13 13:40. Заголовок: Interesting Facts About The English Language

There are some facts about English that I'd like to share :)

1. The most common letter in English is "e".
2. The most common vowel in English is "e", followed by "a".
3. The most common consonant in English is "r", followed by "t".
4. Every syllable in English must have a vowel (sound). Not all syllables have consonants.
5. Only two English words in current use end in "-gry". They are "angry" and "hungry".
6. The word "bookkeeper" (along with its associate "bookkeeping") is the only unhyphenated English word with three consecutive double letters. Other such words, like "sweet-toothed", require a hyphen to be readily readable.
7. The word "triskaidekaphobia" means "fear of Friday the 13th". It also means "superstition about the number thirteen" in general.
8. More English words begin with the letter "s" than with any other letter.
9. A preposition is always followed by a noun (ie noun, proper noun, pronoun, noun group, gerund).
10. The word "uncopyrightable" is the longest English word in normal use that contains no letter more than once.

 Отправлено: 22.01.13 13:44. Заголовок: 11. A sentence that ..

11. A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a "pangram".
12. The following sentence contains all 26 letters of the alphabet: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This sentence is often used to test typewriters or keyboards.
13. The only word in English that ends with the letters "-mt" is "dreamt" (which is a variant spelling of "dreamed") - as well of course as "undreamt" :)
14. A word formed by joining together parts of existing words is called a "blend" (or, less commonly, a "portmanteau word"). Many new words enter the English language in this way. Examples are "brunch" (breakfast + lunch); "motel" (motorcar + hotel); and "guesstimate" (guess + estimate). Note that blends are not the same as compounds or compound nouns, which form when two whole words join together, for example: website, blackboard, darkroom.
15. The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, bēta.
16. The dot over the letter "i" and the letter "j" is called a "superscript dot".
17. In normal usage, the # symbol has several names, for example: hash, pound sign, number sign.
18. In English, the @ symbol is usually called "the at sign" or "the at symbol".
19. If we place a comma before the word "and" at the end of a list, this is known as an "Oxford comma" or a "serial comma". For example: "I drink coffee, tea, and wine."
20. Some words exist only in plural form, for example: glasses (spectacles), binoculars, scissors, shears, tongs, gallows, trousers, jeans, pants, pyjamas (but note that clothing words often become singular when we use them as modifiers, as in "trouser pocket").

 Отправлено: 22.01.13 13:47. Заголовок: 21. The shortest com..

21. The shortest complete sentence in English is the following. "I am."
22. The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".
23. We pronounce the combination "ough" in 9 different ways, as in the following sentence which contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
24. The longest English word without a true vowel (a, e, i, o or u) is "rhythm".
25. The only planet not named after a god is our own, Earth. The others are, in order from the Sun, Mercury, Venus, [Earth,] Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
26. There are only 4 English words in common use ending in "-dous": hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.
27. We can find 10 words in the 7-letter word "therein" without rearranging any of its letters: the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.
28. The following sentence contains 7 identical words in a row and still makes sense. "It is true for all that that that that that that that refers to is not the same that that that that refers to." (= It is true for all that, that that "that" which that "that" refers to is not the same "that" which that "that" refers to.)

A sentence with a similar pattern, which may help to unravel the above, is:
It is true, despite everything you say, that this word which this word refers to is not the same word which this word refers to.

Or, if you insist on being really correct:
It is true, despite everything you say, that this word to which this word refers is not the same word to which this word refers.

29. The "QWERTY keyboard" gains its name from the fact that its first 6 letter keys are Q, W, E, R, T and Y. On early typewriters the keys were arranged in such a way as to minimize the clashing of the mechanical rods that carried the letters.

 Отправлено: 05.07.13 17:07. Заголовок: ISH

30.ish The edning ish can be added to basically anything. It means about, approximately, roughly. For example; What time is it? It is 6ish. This means that it is about 5 till or after 6.

You can tell your students that they are smartish.

How tall was the man that you spoke with? He was tallish.

That car must be expensive! It was only 2 millionish rubles.

Now that you are in the know, try to use this phrase "ish".

 Отправлено: 25.12.13 21:45. Заголовок: Do you know word ..

Do you know word 'alphabet' comes from first two letters Greek alphabet - alpha and beta ?

Here is a very simple sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet ,it is 'The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog ' !

Do you know about 'crutch words' ?Crutch words are those words which we slip into sentences to give us more time to think or emphasize on some point. We start using them unconsciously but gradually they became part of our verbal tics.Few examples of these words are -actually,obviously,like,honestly,basically etc.Most of the times they don't add any value or meaning of a statement ,for example,'I actually was absent that day.'So what is your crutch word?

Challenge your friends by asking them to tell a rhyming English word for any of following five words- month,silver,angel,orange or bulb.Actually there is no rhyming word in English language for any of these five words!

Want to impress your friends? Remember, Scolionophobia –It means to have fear of School, hope you don’t have it.

Talking of Phobias, you may get whole list of phobias on the Internet, but here is one interesting phobia - ‘Phobophobia’–It means fear (phobia) of having any phobia. So you got a word for phobia of phobias.

The word 'swims' when turned upside down will still look like same i.e.'swims'.

Now test your friends, ask them to say ‘the sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick’.It is known to be the toughest tongue –twister in English language.

Do you know a funny fact about the word 'listen'? It contains the same letters as the word 'silent'!

Do you know there used to be a word in the dictionary (from 1932 to 1940), which did not have any meaning? The word was ‘Dord’.It happened due to some error, this word was later known as Ghost word.

 Отправлено: 25.12.13 21:48. Заголовок: You would be surpris..

You would be surprised to know that ‘Pronunciation’ is the most mispronounced word.

The longest word in English is 45 letters long ! It is 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis'! It refers to a lung disease caused by silica dust.

Do you know about a 5 letter word in English dictionary, which is pronounced in the same way even when the last four letters are removed from it? Oh, you guessed it right, it is ‘queue’.

Here is something more about ‘Q’, would like to tell you that it is the least used letter in English language.

Do you know there are few words in English language, which only exist in plural form? Here are few –glasses, scissors, trousers, jeans, pants etc.

Also you may be interested to know that one in every 6 persons in world knows or speaks English.

Also the first word spoken on the moon by a human was an English word! Do you want to know what it was ? It was ‘ok’ (well a small controversy exists here,few say it was ‘Houston’ ,others say it was ‘Contact’, anyway all the said word were in English).

Don’t be surprised if we tell you that English has richest vocabulary as compared to any other language in the world. Few of the dictionaries claim to have 6, 00,000 words.

Going into history of dictionaries, we would like to tell that the first English dictionary was printed in 1755.

 Отправлено: 25.12.13 21:50. Заголовок: There are many words..

There are many words in English, whose origin is very interesting .One of the words originated from marbles game! Have you ever played marbles? If yes, you must be knowing that sometimes players have to put their knuckles down on ground to take best hit, so from this a word originated ‘knuckle down’ which means to work very hard.

Here is one more interesting history of origin of another word 'trivia'. It comes from a Latin word ‘trivium’ which means a place where 3 roads meet, a kind of people square in old times. People would regularly gather there & would talk about all kind of things, most of which were very small & mostly useless so the trivia word originated which means interesting but useless things.

Do you know that origin of word 'sinister' is rooted to superstitions.Ancient Romans were highly superstitious .One of the example is their fear for anything to do with the left, which is why their words for ‘left’ and ‘left-handed’ were sinister and sinstra , giving us the modern meaning of the word ‘sinister’ meaning bad or wicked.

Let’s tell you about an unusual word. It is one of the few very last words in any dictionary ,it is ‘zyzzyva’ ,it is an insect which is very destructive for plants.

Here is one interesting fact about a word 'Bookkeeper'.It is the only word in English language with three consecutive double letters!

Do you know that the adjective most often used to qualify the noun 'heart' is 'broken'.