10 Interesting Facts About the English Language — Including the Longest Word

The longest word takes three hours to pronounce!

The English language is the most spoken language on the planet, it is the language of the skies i.e. to be a pilot you must be able to speak fluent English because it is the language used by all pilots and airports. It is the world’s language. Here are ten interesting facts about it that you probably did not know:

“The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” holds the Guinness world record for being the hardest tongue twister in the English language. Try to say it even once with any kind of fluidity let alone six times in a row quickly, and you’ll see why.

The word “therein” contains the most words in it that do not require any rearranging. The, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, herein, and therein. All of those words exist within “therein” and you don’t have to do any rearranging to make them, you just have to drop the appropriate letters.

The word girl used to mean a small boy or girl, meaning it was not gender specific. It used to just mean a child. It was only around the beginning of the sixteenth century that it started to mean specifically a female child. Nobody has any idea what led to the change.

A hero and a heroine used to mean the person doing the saving and the person being saved i.e. so they were not gender specific. However, because in fiction and the movies it was always the man saving the woman, the word heroine evolved to become a term for a female hero.

“Bookkeeper” and “bookkeeping” are the only two words in the entire English language that contain three consecutive double letters.

The shortest complete sentence in the English language is “I am.” The shortest grammatically correct sentence on the other hand is “go.” What that means is that “I am” is a full sentence whereas “go” is not, but it is a grammatically correct sentence and so a sentence. Meaning it’s a sentence but not a full sentence, whereas “I am” is. Yep, sentences can be confusing.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not the longest word in English, not even close. The longest word that can be found in a dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It is believed to have been coined by Everett Smith back in 1935, who at the time was the president of the National Puzzlers League. And it refers to a lung disease caused by silica dust. Here’s how to pronounce it: nyoo·muh·now·uhl·truh·mai·kruh·sko·puhk·si·luh·kow·vol·kay·now·kow·nuh·ow·suhs.

The longest word in the entirety of the English language contains 189,819 letters and takes three hours to pronounce. It is the chemical name of ‘titin’ (also known as ‘connectin’) — the largest known protein. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) — the body that names chemicals — gave it the name and it is so long because it has to contain all the information about the protein i.e. because it’s such a big protein, a crazy amount of information has to be contained within its name. This is the shortened version of it: “Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl…isoleucine.” If you wish to see the full version of it, see the link at the end of this post.

The sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, uses every letter of the alphabet. Such sentences are called pangrams — Greek for every letter. There are many such sentences, another being “The five boxing wizards jump quickly”, however, the former is the most famous one.

The sentence, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”, uses every letter of the alphabet bar the letter “s”. That makes it a lipogram — ancient Greek for “leaving out a letter”. A lipogram is a written work in which a particular letter or group of letters is intentionally omitted. The best example comes from Ernest Wright, whose 50,000 words long novel Gadsby did not contain the letter “e.” That means he wrote an entire novel without using the most used letter in the English language. Crazy I know.

That’s all from me, thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy the following:

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Finally, as promised the link to the longest word:

The longest word in the English language