weird-language-facts

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[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:

My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word "the" used in phrases like: "the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall". This "the" is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English "þā", pronounced "tha" which means either "when" or "then". Back in early Middle English the structure "if - then" had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said "þā whatever, þā whatever", meaning "when such-and- such, then such-and-such". "þā" sounds almost the same as "the" and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. "the more, the merrier" literally means "when more, then merrier" or "if more, then merrier'; same as centuries ago.

end ID]

this is so cool

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The word “slang” is short for “short language”

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The longest English word with no vowel is “rhythms”.

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The words “idiot” “imbecile” and “moron” were originally medical categories for intellectual disability.

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“Uncopyrightable” is the longest word in everyday use that uses each letter no more than once.

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“Queueing” is the only english word with 5 consecutive vowels.

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“Bookkeeper” and “bookkeeping” are the only words in the language with 3 consecutive double letters.

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According to the University of Warwick and their researchers, the top 10 funniest words in the language are booty, tit, booby, hooter, nitwit, twit, waddle, tinkle, bebop, and egghead.

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The word “queue” will sound the same even if you take off the last four letters.

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A new word is created every 98 minutes - that is about 14.7 words a day.

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A ghost word is a word that doesn’t mean anything but appeared in the dictionary due to printing errors. One such ghost word is “dord”, appearing for 8 years in the 20th century.

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The word girl used to be a gender neutral term, referring to a small child or young person.

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The word awful used to mean “full of awe”.

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There are 7 ways to spell out the sound “ee” in english. The following sentence contains ALL of them.

“He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas.”

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The word “goodbye” is a contraction of the old english phrase “god be with you”.

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Words that are used to fill gaps in speech (i.e. like, basically, um) are called crutch words. Try to avoid them!!

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The letter E takes up a whopping 11% of the language.