From
The Director's Desk

English words have lots of interesting facts such as

a letter from our director

  1. The word “electrocute” is a combination of the words electro and execute, meaning killed by electricity. So if you don’t die, you were not electrocuted, you were shocked. (Are you shocked?)
  2. A pangram sentence is one that contains every letter in the Alphabet. For example, the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a pangram.
  3. The following sentence contains seven different spellings of the sound “ee”: ‘He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas’.
  4. Due to a printing error, there was a word in the English dictionary from 1932 to 1940 which didn’t have a meaning. The word was ‘Dord’ and it became known as a ‘ghost word’.
  5. Queue”is pronounced the same way when the last 4 letters are removed
  6. Uncopyrightable” is the longest English word that doesn’t use a letter more than once
  7. The shortest, oldest, and most common English word is “I
  8. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” is the longest English word
  9. SWIMS”will still be “SWIMS” when turned upside down
  10. Almost” is the longest English word with all of its letters in alphabetical order
  11. Goddessship” is the only English word with a triple letter
  12. Only 4 English words end in “-dous”: “tremendous,” “horrendous,” “stupendous,” and “hazardous
  13. Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in “mt”
  14. The word “alphabet” comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, and beta.
  15. The word “Checkmate” in chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat” meaning “the king is helpless”.
  16. We can find 10 words in the 7-letter word “therein” without rearranging any of its letters: the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.
  17. The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
  18. Bookkeeper’ and ‘bookkeeping’ are the only 2 words in the English language with three consecutive double letters.
  19. The word ‘Strengths’ is the longest word in the English language with just one vowel.
  20. Mozambique is the only country where all the vowels are used.
Founder
Kalpana Rao