Photo by Timo Müller on Unsplash
I’m pretty bogged down in writing my WIP novel at the moment, so don’t have time to give a lot of thought to a blog post, but here are some facts about English words. I hope you find them entertaining.
1. ‘Feedback’ is the shortest word containing all the letter from a-f.
2. The word ‘jentacular’ means pertaining to breakfast (cornflakes are a tasty jentacular food).
3. The word ‘ambulance’ relates to walking. Apparently Napoleon came up with the idea of using a cart to wheel injured soldiers out of harm’s way, and it was called a ‘hopital ambulant’ (a walking hospital), which is where the word ambulance came from.
4. ‘Subcontinental’ is the only word that uses each of the five vowels once only and in reverse order.
5. ‘Bogus’ was originally a noun. It was a machine that produced counterfeit coins, and eventually came to be a shorthand word for counterfeit.
6. The word ‘pandemonium’ was coined by John Milton for the poem Paradise Lost, and roughly translates as ‘place for all demons’.
7. ‘Startling’ is the only 9-letter word where you can remove one letter at a time and still have a valid word (startling -> starting -> staring -> string -> sting -> sing -> sin -> in -> I).
8. The most used letters in English are E, T, A, O, I, N, S, R, H, L, D and C (fans of Wordle make note!) and 80 percent of all words will contain one or more of these letters.
9. If you take the word ‘yes’ and shift every letter back ten places in the alphabet, you get ‘oui’ (yes in French).
10. The longest word whose letters appear in alphabetical order is ‘Aegilops’ – the name of a genus of grasses related to wheat.
I find this sort of thing interesting – hopefully you do, too! My personal favourite is number 9.
Sian Turner 