Fun English Language Facts That All Writers Should Know

by Laura Peters

As a writer, it’s all too easy to get bogged down with the boring bits of the English language, such as grammar rules and sentence structure. But it’s also important to remember that there is also a fun side to language! If you do your research, you’ll find that there are a lot of fun facts related to English. Here are some to get you started!

English is one of the most widespread languages around the world, and the history of English as a global language goes back a long way. Right back to the 1600s in fact, when the language was spread through imperialism.
Do you know what the shortest possible sentence in English is? It’s “I am.” Who knew?!
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a very interesting sentence indeed. You know why that is? That’s because it is a pangram – a sentence that includes every letter of the English alphabet.
“Uncopyrightable” is the longest word that you can make before repeating any letters.
You will have probably heard the word. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from the movie Mary Poppins. It’s a really fun word to say, and the film mentions that it’s the longest word in the English language. But that isn’t the case! In fact, “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” beats it to being the longest word.
“S” is one of the most-used words in the whole alphabet. In actual fact, most words begin with this letter.
There are nine completely different ways you can pronounce “ough” in English. For example, the town of Scarborough is pronounced a lot differently to the word “plough”. Other ways you can pronounce this grouping of letters include “dough”, “rough”, and “cough”.
Have you ever heard of ghost words? Probably not, as there has only ever been one in the whole history of the English language. That was “dord” and it appeared in the dictionary between 1932 and 1940 because of a printing error. It didn’t have a meaning!
There is a new word added to the English dictionary every two hours. If you think that is pretty wild, just think that over the course of just one year, around 4,000 new words get added. That’s a whole lot of words you need to learn!
Do you know what is so special about the word “swims”? Well, turn it upside down and take a look. That’s right! When you turn the word “swims” upside down, it still reads as “swims”!
Do you know why the sentence “he believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas” is intriguing? It’s because it features a lot of different ways you can spell the sound “ee”.
The word “queueing” is the only one that features five consecutive vowels. It’s definitely one you should remember for the next time you play Scrabble!
Nothing rhymes with the words “comedy”, “orange”, and “purple”.

I bet you didn’t know that the English language could be so fun and interesting! Hopefully, these facts will help you enjoy your writing a lot more now!

Guest post contributed by Laura Peters.