25 INTERESTING LANGUAGE FACTS

1. There are around 41,806 different spoken languages in the world today.
2. China has more English speakers than the United States.
3. "Goodbye" came from "God bye" which came from "God be with you."
4. The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet.
5. "Go" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
6. The Danish word for condom is 'svangerskabsforebyggendemiddel'.
7. The onion is named after the Latin word 'unio' meaning large pearl.
8. The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters.
9. The word "pornography" comes from the Greek meaning the "writings of prostitutes."
10. There was no punctuation until the 15th century.
11. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple and month.
12. The word taxi is spelled the same in English, German, French, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese.
13. The word 'set' has more definitions than any other word in the English language.
14. The word 'News' is actually an acronym standing for the 4 cardinal compass points - North, East, West, and South.
15. The word 'gymnasium' comes from the Greek word gymnazein which means "to exercise naked".
16. The phrase 'rule of thumb' is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
17. The longest word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".
18. The most used letter in the English alphabet is 'E' and 'Q' is the least used.
19. The longest word in the English language with no vowels is rhythms.
20. The longest word in the English language is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses.
21. The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.
22. Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the American States.
23. In England, in the 1880's, 'pants' was considered a dirty word.
24. French was the official language of England for over 600 years.
25. Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel, "Gadsby", which contains over 50,000 words -- none of them with the letter E!