A Dozen Fun Facts About Words and the Language

Where would we be without words? Well, it would be very quiet, and there would be no books to read. So words are good things. And they are fun things, too, as these 12 fun facts will prove!

1  If you are a poet, you already know this: no words rhyme with silver, month, orange, or purple.

2. There are only two words — actually now three — that end in -gry: hungry, angry, and our new word hangry. Hangry is, of course, hungry AND angry at the same time.

3. The shortest complete sentence in the English language is Go. Since it is a command, the subject is implied and is (you). 

4. Ever wonder what that little dot over the lowercase i is? Does is even have a name? Of course it does. Everything has a name. It is called a tittle, and I would suppose that the little dot over the lowercase j is called the same thing!

5. A sentence that contains a single word (like the aforementioned Go.) is called a monepic sentence.

6. Attention, math people: If you wrote out every number in the standard English counting system (one, two, three, four) in alphabetical order, no matter how high you counted, the first number would always be eight. The second would always be eight billion.

7. The most common word used in English language conversation is  . . .(wait for it) . . . I. How’s that for ego?

8. The most common adjective used in the English language is good.

9. The most commonly used noun is one you wouldn’t guess . . . time.

10. The word (can we really call it a word?) lol was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011 (seems like just yesterday).

11. In English the word happy is used three times more often than sad (I guess that is good news — notice how I used the most commonly used adjective there). 

and

12. The random symbol or series of symbols we used to represent letters in swear words (sh*t, for example) is called a grawlix.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend, and remember to buy some books! (Mine included!)