Nine Things You Might Not Know

Nine things about the English language you may not know….

1.The oldest, shortest, and most common word in the English language is I.

2. The word girl used to be gender neutral and refer to any child or young person.

3. After winning our independence from Britain, Noah Webster led the charge to be free from the “clamor of pedantry” of British spelling by removing unnecessary letters, such as the u from colour and flavour.

 4. Words like this and thing have distinct th sounds, which is called a “dental fricative.” There are two types, voiced (like this), and voiceless (like thing). Interestingly, most languages do not have a voiced dental fricative.

5. “I before e, except after c

Or when sounded as a as in neighbor and weigh”

Unless the c is part of a sh sound as in glacier

Or it appears in comparatives and superlatives like fancier

And also except when the vowels are sounded as  e as in seize

Or i as in height

Or also in -ing inflections ending in -e as in cueing

Or in compound words as in albeit

Or occasionally in technical words with strong etymological links to their parent languages as in cuneiform

Or in other numerous and random exceptions such as science, forfeit, and weird.

6. Did you know that enneacontakaienneagon is a word in the English language? (And you thought pronouncing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was difficult?). In fact, the meaning of the word is just as bizarre as the word itself: it’s a shape with 99 sides.

7. Believe it or not, there are some words that appeared in the dictionary because of printing errors. They are known as ghost words. The nonexistent word dord appeared in the dictionary for eight years in the mid-20th century. 

8. A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours.

Between now and your next meal, a new word will be put into the dictionary. During the course of the year, almost 4,000 new words are added. 

9. Words we always use even though they add no meaning or value to a sentence are called “crutch words.” For example, in the sentence “Then I was like, OMG, then like, he went there, and like…” it is pretty obvious that like is the crutch word. Actually, honestly, and basically are also common crutch words.