50 Fun Facts About English Language

English is named after which Germanic people who migrated to Britain after Roman rule?

The Saxons and Jutes came with them, and their dialects together became Old English.

To which branch of the Indo-European family does English belong?

That puts it alongside Dutch, German and Frisian rather than the Scandinavian languages.

English is the third most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and which other?

Counting second-language speakers, it is the most spoken language in the world.

Roughly how many English speakers worldwide did Ethnologue estimate as of 2021?

There are more second-language speakers than native ones.

English is an official language of how many sovereign states?

Plus 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language.

French dialects are the source of approximately what share of Modern English words?

Latin supplies a further 28 per cent, though the grammar and everyday vocabulary stay Germanic.

Modern English exists on a dialect continuum with which language?

After that it is closest to Low Saxon and Frisian.

Which pronouns did English take from Old Norse, replacing Anglo-Saxon forms with h-?

The older forms were hie, him and hera.

Which of these everyday words is an Old Norse loanword?

Give, get, sky, skirt and cake came the same way, usually displacing a native word.

Old English was spoken from about AD 450 until roughly which year?

It is also called Anglo-Saxon and was first written in runes.

The Scandinavian-controlled region of northern and eastern England was called what?

It followed the Great Heathen Army's invasion of 865 and seeded English with Norse words.

Which event of 1066 made Anglo-French the language of England's upper classes?

English re-emerged afterwards as Middle English, soaked in French vocabulary.

The Great Vowel Shift took place primarily between which years?

Spelling was being standardised at the same time, which is why spellings now stray so far from sounds.

Which Danish linguist coined the term 'Great Vowel Shift'?

He did so in 1909 in A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles and drew the first diagram of it.

How many alliterative lines does the Old English epic Beowulf run to?

It survives in a single manuscript, the Nowell Codex.

How many stories make up Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

Written in Middle English between 1387 and 1400, they are framed as a pilgrims' storytelling contest.

Who is thought to have introduced the printing press to England in 1476?

He was also England's first retailer of printed books.

The King James Bible, commissioned in 1604, was published in which year?

It is an Early Modern English translation made for the Church of England and Church of Scotland.

How many words did Shakespeare use across his plays, sonnets and poems, per Warren King?

Of those, about 1,700 are said to have been first used by Shakespeare.

In which year was Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language published?

It was prepared at 17 Gough Square, London, between 1746 and 1755.

Roughly how many words did the first edition of Johnson's dictionary list?

His innovation was illustrating meanings with around 114,000 literary quotations from some 500 authors.

In which year did Noah Webster publish An American Dictionary of the English Language?

He was seventy, and registered the copyright on April 14.

How many words did Webster's 1828 dictionary contain?

Twelve thousand of them had never appeared in a published dictionary before.

Webster changed the British '-re' ending to what in words such as 'center'?

He also dropped the 'u' from colour and one 'l' from traveller.

In which year did the Oxford English Dictionary begin publication?

Work had started in 1857, and the full dictionary was republished in 10 bound volumes in 1928.

The OED's 1989 second edition ran to how many volumes?

It comprised 21,728 pages; the third edition may never be printed at all.

Which short verb had the longest entry in the OED's second edition, with some 580 senses?

The entry needed 60,000 words; 430 senses were for the bare verb.

Who became the OED's founding editor after being approached by Furnivall?

He was reluctant to include scientific terms unless widely used.

Which element's name was notoriously left out of the OED in 1903 as too obscure?

Months later its discoverers, Pierre and Marie Curie, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

How many letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the longest dictionary word?

It names a lung disease from very fine silica dust and was coined deliberately to be the longest word.

Which 29-letter word means 'the act of estimating something as worthless'?

It strings together Latin words for 'nothing' and has been recorded since 1741.

Which 28-letter word is absent from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary for lack of real usage?

That dictionary's longest entry is electroencephalographically, at 27 letters.

A computer study found the longest word one is likely to meet every day is which 20-letter word?

The study sampled over a million pieces of ordinary English prose.

Which ancient Greek playwright coined a 171-letter word describing a dish?

It appears in his comedy Assemblywomen and strings together the dish's ingredients.

'Ghoti' is a joke respelling of which English word?

gh as in 'enough', o as in 'women', ti as in 'nation'; it is often misattributed to George Bernard Shaw.

Which playwright is 'ghoti' usually, and wrongly, attributed to?

The word does not appear in his writings; a biography credits an anonymous spelling reformer.

Which animal does the quick brown fox jump over in the best-known English pangram?

The hunt for a shorter pangram drives the plot of Mark Dunn's novel Ella Minnow Pea.

Mark Dunn's novel built around pangrams is called what?

The title sounds out L-M-N-O-P.

How many letters does the modern English alphabet have?

Each has an uppercase and a lowercase form; the set was settled by the 16th century.

The word 'ampersand' is a corruption of which phrase?

Letters that were also words, like A and I, were spelled aloud with the Latin 'per se'.

Which Old English letter, standing for 'th', was replaced by 'y' to give 'ye olde'?

Early printers lacked the letter, so 'ye' in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe' was always pronounced 'the'.

What 12-letter sequence did Linotype machines assume as English's most to least common letters?

It came from the habits of manual compositors and became a printer's in-joke.

Which keyboard layout was optimised for transcribing telegraphs rather than letter frequency?

Dvorak and Colemak put the most frequent letters on the home row instead.

Which British accent has traditionally served as the broadcast standard?

It was originally associated with educated speakers in South East England.

Which monster attacks Hrothgar's mead hall Heorot in Beowulf?

The attacks had gone on for twelve years before Beowulf arrived.

Chaucer's pilgrims travel to whose shrine at Canterbury Cathedral?

The frame is a storytelling contest on the road from London.

Webster's early income came from which schoolbook, which funded his dictionary work?

He also wrote a grammar and a reader for elementary schools.

Old English was first written in which script before adopting Latin letters?

The English alphabet fully supplanted runes by the High Middle Ages.

Which 30-letter word does the Oxford English Dictionary contain?

It names a rare inherited disorder; the OED does not list the 45-letter lung-disease coinage at the top of the list.

Which of these is NOT among the Germanic languages that share Grimm's law with English?

Polish is Slavic; the Germanic group descends from Proto-Germanic.