Word

A word is a unit of spoken or written language.

The English language now contains close to a million words.

The study of word origins is called etymology.

WORDS IN HISTORY

There are 23 words that researchers believe date back 15,000 years, making them the oldest known words. They are: thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm.

The etymology of the word "clue" is from a Greek myth, when Theseus enters the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaur (a half-man, half-bull). He unraveled a "clew" -a ball of string- behind him, so he could find his way out of the labyrinth. "Clew" was mispelled overtime, but kept its symbolic meaning.

Experts think Shakespeare used 17,677 different words.

There are 21,785 words in the English dictionary that first appeared in the 18th century.

The word "dord; was accidentally created, as a ghost word, by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster) in the 1934 edition of the New International Dictionary. That dictionary defined the term a synonym for density used in physics and chemistry in the following way: "dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density." On February 28, 1939, an editor discovered the erroneous word "dord" in the Websters New International Dictionary, Second Edition, prompting an investigation. The non-word "dord" was excised.

RECORDS 

The longest word to occur in a literary work has to do with a meat dish cut into pieces served in sauce, with 17 sweet and sour ingredients, including brains, fish, honey vinegar, ouzo and pickles. The word appears in Women at the Ecclesia, a satirical comedy by Aristophanes, an Athenian playwright. In Greek, the word is 170 letters; transliterated into English it is 182 letters. It is: Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.

The longest real word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is floccinaucinihilipilification, which has 29 letters. The meaning of the word is "the act of estimating as worthless". The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

THE English word with the most meanings is "set". The Oxford English Dictionary"s entry is 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters, long with 430 different senses of the word.

UNUSUAL WORDS 

Queue is the only word in the English language that is still said the same way when the last four letters are removed.

"Omnishambles", coined by the television series The Thick Of It, was named the Word of the Year for 2012.

The word "uncopyrightable" consists entirely of 15 different letters. Along with "dermatoglyphics" (study of fingerprints), it is the longest such word.

At 16 letters long, unprosperousness is the longest word in the English language in which each of its letters occurs at least twice.

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

The words "racecar" and "kayak" are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.

"Strengths" is the longest English word with only one vowel.

"Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.

The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

There are three words in the English language with two "u"s" in consecutive order: vacuum, residuum, and continuum.

The Oxford English Dictionary added "Zyzzyva" as a new last word in 2017. Pronounced "zih-zih-vah", it"s the name of a genus of tropical weevils found in South America. Previously, the last word was "zythum", a beer brewed in ancient Egypt.

"Mamihlapinatapai" is a word spoken in the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, located in an archipelago off the South American mainland. It is listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. The word means "a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin."

COMMON WORDS 

The 100 most common words in English account for 50 per cent of all we speak or write.

Among the 100 most used words in English, only "person" and "because" have more than five letters.

"Huh?" is a universal word expressing misunderstanding, found in languages across the globe including: Icelandic, Russian, Spanish, Mandarin, Cha"palaa, Murrinh-Patha, and Lao.

"Ain"t" has been called the most socially stigmatized word in the English language", as well as "the most powerful social marker" in English. "Ain"t" wasn't always a socially acceptable contraction and was used by the educated and the upper-class throughout the 17th to 19th century.

FUN WORD FACTS 

A new English word is created every 98 minutes — about 14 per day, says the Global Language Monitor.

6,000 is the minimum number of words women speak each day, while it"s only 2,000 to 4,000 for men.

In vocabulary development from age six to eight, the average child in school is learning six to seven words per day.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.

"A-hoy" was a Middle English greeting for "hello" so "Ships, Ahoy" means that you are hailing the ships.

“Goodbye” comes from the 16th century word “Godbwye,” a contraction of the phrase “God be with ye.”

"Second" (after first) is the same word as "second" (a 60th of a minute), because we get a minute from dividing the hour by 60, and then we divide it a second time.

Fossil words are words that have largely fallen out of common use but still survive in idioms. Examples include "lo" as in (lo and behold) and "fro" (as in to and fro).

Lonely negatives are words with common prefixes or suffixes such as "dis-", "in-", "un-", "-less" but without positive counterparts such as the words "disgust", "disappoint", "reckless" - they don't have "gust", "appoint", or "reckful" as their opposites.

An "unpaired word" is a word that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word, but does not. Examples include disgruntled, nonchalant, and ruthless.

A synanagram is a word whose letters can be rearranged to form a different word with the same meaning—like ‘angered’ and ‘enraged’. ‘Twelve plus one’ is an anagram of ‘eleven plus two.’ and both add up to 13!

Words that share a semantic relationship and are grouped in a specific order are called Irreversible Binomials/Trinomials. This can include things like "rank and file, "spick and span," and "lock, stock, and barrel."

Words that change meaning and sometimes pronunciation based on the capitalization of the first letter, like "Polish" vs. "polish" are called Capitonyms.

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