Top 10 Fun Facts About English You Did Not Know

Do you know how many English words are added to the dictionary every year? What is the longest English word and what is the most commonly used one? I’ve found answers to all the questions about the English language you may have ever thought of. Here are 10 funny facts about English! And look out for our special offer for general English Skype lessons just for readers of this article. 😉

1. More people have learned English as their second language than there are native English speakers in the world

One thing this fact should tell you for sure is that English is indeed a universal language and you definitely need to learn it if you want to move to another country or to work in an international company.

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2. A new word is added to a dictionary every two hours

It means around 4 000 new words are added to the English dictionary every year. Partly, it happens because we more and more use brand names as common nouns, which means that such word as “to google” make their way into official dictionaries.

Another thing is new trends and movements that keep originating online every second. Not all of them become large enough to be noticed and officially recognized, but many still make it to the dictionaries. For example, the phrase “the silver tsunami” or “gray tsunami”, that describes the rapid aging of the population in mass media, ended up in a dictionary as a widely recognized metaphor. The adjective “on-brand” also recently entered our vocabulary. Originally, it was used in social media to describe posts and activities of popular influencers that correlated well with their personal brands. Now, this is a popular term, commonly used by branding experts and wider audiences. And of course, tattoo enthusiasts will know the term “stick and poke” that entered the dictionaries last year. It is used to describe the technique of making dotted tattoos, which became very popular in 2019. That’s how the vocabulary constantly grows.

The good thing, however, is that these words are usually universal across the globe and you don’t need to worry about learning them in English — you probably use them in your own language already!

3. Shakespeare introduced over 1 000 new words to the English language

When writing his plays and poems, he sometimes came up with new words. For example, it was William who used such words as “addiction”, “cold-blooded”, “swagger”, “to break the ice” for the first time.

As his writings were extremely popular, people continue to quote him and use the phrases and words in real life. That’s how these words soon became a part of the language.

4. The average English speaker knows between 20 000 and 30 000 words

What is really meant by this is that an average native English-speaking person will understand that number of words. However, it does not mean that so many words are used by them on a daily or even a monthly basis. Most of these words are the ones they will recognize and understand if they see them in books or hear them in historical movies and TV shows.

For a normal day-to-day conversation, we use no more than 10 000 words. Furthermore, to actually understand English and start speaking with confidence, you need to learn only 800 of the most frequently-used lemmas in English. This will let you understand 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal life.

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5. The Longest English Word Is 45 Letters Long

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” was for a long time considered to be the longest word in the English language. It means fantastic and was popularized by the movie Mary Poppins.

However, there is an even longer word, officially recognized in a dictionary: “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”. It’s the name of a disease and considered to be a technical term. There are 45 letters in this word! Surprisingly, there are even longer English words, including chemical names, however, none of the major dictionaries recognizes them as words so you should not worry about ever seeing or hearing these words in real-life situations.

6. The most used words in English

If you look at written English text, you will definitely notice that the articles are the most common words in the text. “The” is the most used word in English and “A” is the sixth most common. The most common verb is “to be”, it ranks as the second most common word in the language, and the most common noun is “I”, which is ranked as the tenth most common English word. It is similar to many other European languages.

7. The English word that has the most synonyms is “good”

There are an astonishing 380 ways to say “good” in English. Great, amazing, terrific — there are so many of them. I’m not sure you will find a person who will know them all but I highly recommend learning at least 10 or 20 synonyms. It will make your speaking and writing more diverse and help you sound like a native English speaker.

On the other hand, the word “synonym” is one of very few English words that does not have synonyms.

8. English is the language of the skies

Pilots, flight crews, and air traffic controllers — basically, all aviation personnel must pass an English proficiency test. That’s because all communication in the air all over the world has been conducted in English since 2008.

Actually, English had been the unofficial language of pilots for many years before that, however, it took a few tragic incidents to make it an international law for the aviation industry to communicate in English during flights.

9. Americans revolutionized British English and removed unnecessary letters

Do you remember always confusing writing of the words “color” — “colour”, “favorite” — “favourite”, “program” — “programme”, “catalog” — “catalogue”? This difference in spelling occurred when Americans decided to simplify the spelling of English words and get rid of the letters which you do not pronounce.

The first in history American English dictionary was published in 1806 and documented all these changes. That was one of the ways for American people to proclaim their independence from Britons.

10. There are words without meaning in the English language

So-called “ghost” words are the words that were misspelled in the dictionary. In the past, when every page was written and later prepared for printing manually, typos were very common. For example, the word “dord” stayed in the dictionary for over eight years until the next edition was released. However, it is not a real word and it has no meaning.