1.
The most common letter in English is the letter E. The letter E appears in 11 percent of words in the English language and is over 56 times more common than the letter Q, which appears in just 0.2 percent of words.
2.
Only two English words in current use end in “-gry”. They are “angry” and “hungry”.
3.
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.
4.
More English words begin with the letter S than with any other letter. This is mainly because clusters such as “sc”, “sh”, “sp” and “st” act almost like independent letters. The letter E only comes about halfway down the order, and the letter X unsurprisingly comes last.
5.
The word “uncopyrightable” is the longest English word in normal use that contains no letter more than once.
6.
The longest word you can make using only four letters is “senseless”.
7.
A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a “pangram”. The following sentence is a pangram: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This sentence is often used to test typewriters or keyboards.
8.
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”.
9.
The English language is said to be one of the happiest languages in the world. The word “happy” is used 3 times more often than the word “sad”.
10.
“Go!” is the shortest grammatically correct sentence in English.
11.
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.
12.
The oldest English word that is still in use is “town”.
13.
Approximately one new word is added to the English language every two hours and around 4,000 new words are added to the English dictionary each year.
14.
“Queueing” is the only word with five consecutive vowels.
15.
“Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” is the longest word. It is lung disease caused by the inhalation of silica or quartz dust.
16.
Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words, by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words that had never been used together, adding prefixes and suffixes and creating original words. Lonely, elbow, luggage and fashionable are some examples of the words Shakespeare invented.
17.
If you wrote out all the numbers (e.g. one, two, three . . . ), you would not use the letter B until the word “billion”.
18.
English is the language of the sky. This means that all pilots have to identify themselves and speak in English while flying, regardless of their origin.
19.
“Sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” is said to be the toughest tongue twister in English.
20.
The word “alphabet” comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta.
