Did You Know: Watch Your Language! Edition

We all know ‘I’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’, right? And most of us can tell you ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ is a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet (that’s called a pangram). Fancy yourself a grammar god? We’ll see about that. Just take a look at some of these facts about the English language before patting yourself on the back too hard.

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Adam Johnston

Give me a bottle of bourbon and half a chicken, and I’ll conquer the world! My job is to make sure that everyone else does their job, which has to be the easiest job in the world considering the brilliant, hard-working people we have in our Flock. My ultimate goal is to run a company that people are proud to work for. I’m an avid statesman, adventurer, Burner, Broadway aficionado, athlete, and I wear my Cole Haans as often as my cowboy boots. It’s a wonderful life.All Posts

Trivia about Letters and Words

The most common letter in usage is E. The least? Q. Poor, poor Q.

 

More words begin with ‘S’ than any other letter. Several students surveyed said sentence, stupefied.

 

There’s only one common word in English with five consecutive vowels – QUEUEING.

 

The dot over lowercase ‘i’ and ‘j’ is called a superscript dot. We don’t know why it’s so super. It’s just a dot.

 

The shortest, oldest, and most commonly used word is ‘I’. The shortest sentence is ‘I am.’

 

‘One thousand’ has the letter ‘A’. The first nine-hundred and ninety-nine spelled numbers do not.

 

The longest word containing all of its letters alphabetically is ‘almost’.

 

The past tense of the word ‘dare’ is ‘durst’. As in “I durst the country to like Limp Bizkit. To my chagrin, they did.”

 

Can you think of the one word with a double ‘i’? It’s ‘skiing’.

 

If you’re a bookkeeper, then you’re pretty good at bookkeeping. You might also know those are the only two words with three double letters in a row.

 

The longest word contains 45 letters – ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’. It refers to a lung disease caused by inhaling fine ash and dust.