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Fun Facts About English #40 – The Letter ‘s’

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English 40

There are more English words beginning with the letter s than with any other letter mainly because of clusters such as sc, sh, sp, and st. Followed by some distance are words that begin with p, c, d, m, and a.

According to Wolfram Language, a computational knowledge engine, in a list of 40,127 common words, s has 4,635 entries – as compared to x which only has 11. This simple Wolfram word cloud expresses the most frequent initial letters in the English language:

Wolfram Language word cloud

Bear in mind that the frequency of initial letters has no relationship to how often letters occur in English in general. E is the most common letter, followed by t and then a.

If you enjoy learning fun facts about the English language, you may be interested in reading about The Power of X, why Americans say /zee/ when the rest of the world says /zed/, or how the ampersand (&) was once part of the English alphabet!

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Fun Facts About English #30 – Monosyllabic Words

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Fun Facts About English 30 Kinney Brothers Publishing

A list of 9,123 English monosyllabic words published in 1957 includes three ten-letter words: scraunched, scroonched, and squirreled. Other sources include words as long or longer though some are questionable on the grounds of spelling, pronunciation, archaic status, being nonstandard, a proper noun, loanword, or nonce word.

Nine-letter monosyllables are scratched, screeched, scrounged, squelched, straights, and strengths.

Archaic

The past tense ending -ed and the archaic second-person singular ending -st can be combined into -edst. While this ending is usually pronounced as a separate syllable from the verb stem, it may be abbreviated -‘dst to indicate elision. Examples include scratch’dst and stretch’dst, each of which has one syllable spelled with ten letters plus an apostrophe.

Fun Facts About English Kinney Brother Publishing

Nonstandard

Onomatopoeic monosyllables may be extended without limit to represent a long, drawn-out sound or utterance. For example, Yann Martel’s 1995 novel Self includes a 45-letter Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and a 35-letter Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh.

Proper Nouns

Some nine-letter proper names remain monosyllabic when adding a tenth letter and apostrophe to form the possessive:

  • Laugharne’s /ˈlɑːrnz/
  • Scoughall’s /ˈskoʊlz/

Nonce Words

A nonce word is a word created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication, i.e., “for the nonce” or this once. Some nonce words may be essentially meaningless, but they are useful for exactly that reason. For example, the single-syllable word wug was invented by researchers to be used in exercises in child language testing as a word children would not be familiar with.

The poem “Jabberwocky,” by Lewis Carroll, is full of nonce words, with two of them, chortle and galumphing, entering into common use. James Joyce’s 1939 novel, Finnegans Wake, used the monosyllabic quark as a nonce word. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann adopted the word in the 1960s as the name of a subatomic particle.

Click on these links to read about the longest word with no vowels, the word with the most consecutive vowels, or the longest word without a repeating letter!

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Fun Facts About English #21 – Irregular Plurals

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Fun Facts About English 21 Kinney Brothers Publishing

You’re likely familiar with irregular plurals like children, geese, and mice. For many English language students, the logic, or lack thereof when it comes to plurals, can be mind-boggling. Even for native speakers, there are many words that baffle us as well. Without any rules or guidelines, many irregular plurals must simply be learned and remembered.

The language roadmap becomes even more complicated when irregular plurals have alternate plural forms. ThoughtCo explains, “Sometimes, alternative plurals have even developed different senses, as in the cases of (spirit) mediums vs. (mass) media, appendixes (in bodies or books) vs. appendices (only in books), or antennae (for insects) vs. antennas (for televisions or radios).”

As you’ll see in the shortlist below, many words with irregular plurals are loanwords that have kept their foreign plural forms.

  • The plural of beef is beeves. This is true only for beef in the sense of ‘cow.’ Multiple arguments are beefs.
  • The plural of opus is opera or opuses.
  • The plural of sphinx is sphinges. Sphinxes is an acceptable secondary option.
  • The plural of biceps is bicepses.
  • The plural, gender neutral form of nieces and nephews is niblings. Coined in 1951, this neologism is reserved for specialist literature.
  • The plural of attorney general is attorneys general. Similar plurals would be postmasters general, mothers-in-law, and coups d’etat.
  • The singular form of spaghetti is spaghetto! Likewise, the singular form of confetti is confetto, and graffiti is graffito. 

Test your knowledge with this list of the 100 most common irregular plurals!

Mistaking compound words can make a writer (and reader) facepalm! Learn the difference between everyday and every day. You might also be interested in the conundrum with contronyms or the problem with gender neutral nouns!

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Fun Facts About English #11 – Words Without Rhymes

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fun facts about English 11 Kinney Brothers Publishing

The English language has many words that have no rhyme. Besides the above, other words include ninth, pint, wolf, opus, dangerous, marathon, and discombobulate.

For those who find themselves in a language kerfuffle when pining to rhyme, assonance can sometimes carry the verse.

Bronze, plus some silver and gold,
Won’t be of help if you shiver when cold.

Equestrians may be familiar with the word curple, a corrupted form of the Scottish word crupper which means the hindquarters or rump of a horse. Though this word in fact rhymes with purple, it is largely out of use.

Another slang word, nurple – as in a purple nurple, is a rhyming derivation of the words nipple and purple and, in practice, a very painful prank. We shall see if Webster deigns to bring this twisted combination into the fold of notable language in the future.

From Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, 1774

So, how important is all this business with childish rhymes? Many of the nursery rhymes we know today go as far back as the Middle Ages and continue to get passed down generation after generation. Though there are many sites detailing the darker side of nursery rhymes, here are a few lighter facts you may not have heard:

  • Shakespeare mentions Jack and Jill in Love’s Labour’s Lost and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
  • In the 17th century, a Humpty Dumpty was a drink of brandy boiled with ale.
  • The first collection of children’s songs and rhymes in English was Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, published in 1774. It included Hickory Dickory Dock, London Bridge is Falling Down, and Bah, Bah, a black Sheep.
  • Mary Had A Little Lamb was Thomas Edison’s first recording on his phonograph in 1878.
  • In 1951, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep was the first song digitally saved and played on a computer.

Interested in more fun facts about common words? Check out words with opposites that will surprise you! At 15 letters, what is the longest word without a repeating letter? Is your name a capitonym?

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