Interesting+Language+Facts



25% of all words come from the 1st quartile 25% of all words come from the 2nd quartile 25% of all words come from the 3rd quartile 25% of all words come from the 4th quartile

__**Interesting Language Facts and Tidbits**__

There are many interesting facts in the English language, such as the first word spoken on the moon was "okay." Did you know that the name of all the continents end with the same letter they start with? These are just a few of the interesting facts. According to an article from [|The Chicago Tribune], the English language is bearing down on a milestone of its 1,000,000th word. More than half of our vocabulary in the English language is from other cultures. There are 41, 806 different languages spoken in the world. However, about 2,000 of those have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Even though English is the most common language in the world, Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language with 885,000,000 people in China that speak Chinese. China also has more English speakers than the United States. In most languages, just one hundred words compromise about half of all words used in conversation.

In the Illinois state law, its is illegal to speak English, the official recognized language is "American." Over four hundred million people use the English vocabulary as a mother tongue. Seven hundred million people speak English as a foreign language. The main language used throughout the world on the internet is English. The language that is most closely related to English is Flemish, which is spoken in Finland. With all the languages in the world, there are around 175 languages in the world that are spoken by less than ten people. Almost 500 languages are spoken by less than 100. One-fourth of the world's languages are spoken by less than 1,000 people.

The English language has many interesting facts, such as the longest word in the [|Oxford English Dictionary] is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It also is the only word that has the same mount of the letters in the plural form: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses. The shortest word in the English language with all its letters in alphabetical order is almost. The longest one syllable word in English is screeched. The letter most in use in English is “e” and the letter “q” is the least used word. The word "set" has more defitions than any other word in the English language. In a [|dictionary], there are forty-two defitions for "set." Bookkeeper is the one word in the English language that has three consecutive sets of double letters. English is the only language that capitalizes the first person singular “I.” The longest ancronym is adcomsubcomphibspac, which is a Navy term standing for Administartive Command, Amphibious, Forces, and Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command. The word dreamt is the only English word that ends with “mt.” Out of all languages, English has the most vocabulary with about 800,000 words. Also, no language has more syllables than English.

Forty is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. One is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order. The longest word with no repeatable letters is uncopyrightable. There have been 315 words misspelled in [|Merriam Webster's Dictionary]. The word typewriter is the only word using one row of keys on a keyboard. The sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter in the English language. The letter “q” does not appear in the name of any of the United States. The word nice was first coined in 1290, and meant stupid or foolish.

All the world's major alphabets developed from a single alphabet invented 3,600 years ago in the Middle East, known as the North Semetic Alphabet. In Chinese, the words crisis and opportunity are the same. It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear. These are just few of millions of interesting facts about language. These facts shape our language.

Sources [] [] [] [] [|www.portables1.ngfl.gov.uk]