99 Fun Facts About ELA

Which device compares two unlike things using 'like' or 'as'?

A simile signals its comparison openly, as in 'as brave as a lion'. The name is Latin for 'a likeness', from similis, the root of 'similar'.

Which device makes a direct comparison without announcing it with a linking word?

A metaphor states the comparison as fact: 'the classroom was a zoo'. The word is Greek for 'a transfer', because it carries one thing's name over to another.

Which figure of speech gives an inanimate object human traits?

Personification, as in 'the wind whispered', can carry a whole story: the hero of The Pilgrim's Progress meets characters named Faithful, Hopeful and Giant Despair.

Which figure of speech uses deliberate exaggeration for effect?

Hyperbole, as in 'I've told you a million times', takes its name from the Greek for 'a throwing beyond': the speaker overshoots the truth on purpose.

What is a two-word paradox built from opposites called?

An oxymoron, like 'deafening silence', is one itself: the word joins the Greek for 'sharp' and 'dull', so it means something like 'pointedly foolish'.

What is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound across several words called?

Alliteration, as in 'Peter Piper picked a peck', once did the work of rhyme: Old English poems such as Beowulf bind each line with repeated opening sounds instead.

Which device uses words that imitate sounds?

Onomatopoeia, Greek for 'name-making', covers buzz, hiss and clang. It has named animals too: the cuckoo is called after the sound of its own call.

In classical rhetoric, which figures change what words mean, while schemes change only their order?

Tropes, from the Greek for 'a turn', bend a word away from its literal meaning, as irony does. The term has since turned itself, and now also means a stock story device.

Words like 'the' and 'an' are sometimes counted as a ninth part of speech; what are they called?

Articles missed the classic list of eight because it was modelled on Latin, which has no word for 'the': Roman grammarians dropped the category the Greeks had used.

Which part of speech names a person, place, thing or idea?

A noun can be concrete like 'house' or abstract like 'happiness'. English once capitalised most of them: the 1787 US Constitution speaks of 'a more perfect Union' and 'the Blessings of Liberty'.

Which part of speech denotes an action, occurrence or state of being?

A verb, such as 'walk', 'happen' or 'be', carries what a sentence says. Its name comes from the Latin verbum, which simply meant 'word'.

What does an adjective modify?

An adjective attaches to a noun or pronoun, as 'big' and 'brave' do. Its name comes from the Latin for 'added to', because it is tacked on to a noun.

Which part of speech can modify a verb, an adjective, a sentence or another of its own kind?

An adverb needn't end in -ly, as 'very' and 'quite' show, and -ly doesn't make one either: 'friendly' and 'lovely' are adjectives.

Which part of speech substitutes for a noun or noun phrase?

A pronoun such as 'he' or 'them' stands in for a name already mentioned. Using 'they' for one person is no modern habit: it is on record from the 1300s.

Which part of speech relates words to each other in a phrase, like 'in' and 'of'?

A preposition can end a sentence in good English. The schoolroom ban took hold after the poet John Dryden faulted a line of Ben Jonson's in 1672, probably on a false analogy with Latin.

Which part of speech links words, phrases or clauses?

A conjunction such as 'and' or 'but' may open a sentence as well as join its parts: the schoolroom rule against it has been ignored by writers from Shakespeare onwards.

What is a word like 'Alas' or 'Huzzah' called?

An interjection takes its name from the Latin for 'thrown between': words like 'Alas' are tossed into a sentence without being tied to its grammar.

Which symbol began as a handwritten ligature of the Latin word 'et'?

The ampersand fuses the letters e and t. Old schoolbooks put it at the end of the alphabet, and its name is a slurring of 'and per se and': the sign by itself means 'and'.

What forced the standardisation of punctuation in 15th-century Europe?

The rise of printing made a standard system of marks urgent. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius is credited with the semicolon and the modern comma.

Where is the serial comma, set before a list's final 'and', most common?

In the United States it is standard outside journalism. Its other name, the Oxford comma, comes from the house style of Oxford University Press, though it is less usual in British writing.

Which punctuation mark fuses a question mark and an exclamation mark into a single symbol?

The interrobang, proposed in 1962, is named for what it joins: 'interro' from the interrogation point and 'bang', printers' slang for an exclamation mark.

With no dash key, what did typewriter users strike to stand for a long dash?

Two hyphens stood in for a long dash because the typewriter gave the hyphen, the minus sign and every dash a single key. Many word processors turn that pair back into a true dash automatically.

How many lines does a sonnet traditionally have?

Fourteen lines is the rule, though Shakespeare broke it twice among his 154 sonnets: Sonnet 99 runs to fifteen lines and Sonnet 126 stops at twelve.

What are the two parts of a typical Italian sonnet called?

An octave and a sestet: eight lines that raise a question and six that answer it. Both lean on very few rhyme sounds, which comes easier in rhyme-rich Italian than in English.

What is the turn in a sonnet called?

The volta is Italian for 'turn'. Italian sonnets make it after the eighth line, but Shakespeare often held it back for his last two lines, which can overturn all that came before.

What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet?

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG gives three quatrains and a closing couplet. The form carries Shakespeare's name, but the Earl of Surrey had established it decades before Shakespeare wrote.

The Italian sonnet is often named after which poet, who wrote hundreds of poems about a woman called Laura?

Petrarch, by his own account, first saw Laura in an Avignon church in 1327. He went on writing poems about her for some forty years, most of them sonnets.

How many morae, or sound units, does a traditional Japanese haiku contain?

17 is a count of morae, not syllables, and morae are shorter: one English syllable can hold two or three, so 'haibun' is two syllables in English but four morae in Japanese.

A traditional haiku includes a kigo, a word or phrase that signals what?

The season: cherry blossom means spring, cicadas summer. Japanese poets look such words up in a saijiki, an almanac that lists them by time of year with example poems.

In a Japanese haiku, what is a kireji?

A cutting word such as 'ya' breaks a haiku in two or brings it to a firm close. English has no equivalent, so translators often reach for a dash or an ellipsis.

Which 17th-century poet is most associated with elevating the haiku form?

Matsuo Basho left Edo in 1684 on the first of his great wanderings, and a later journey north became The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a classic that weaves his poems into travel prose.

Which American poet's two-line 'In a Station of the Metro' has been called the first haiku in English?

Ezra Pound published it in 1913 after glimpsing a crowd of faces in the Paris Metro, having pared a thirty-line draft down to just 14 words.

Which narrative point of view uses the pronouns 'I' and 'me'?

First person doesn't require the hero to tell the tale: Dr Watson narrates Sherlock Holmes's cases, and Nick Carraway tells Jay Gatsby's story.

Which kind of narrator can report the private thoughts of every character in a story?

An omniscient narrator is, in the Latin sense of the word, 'all-knowing': it can step into any character's mind, where a limited narrator stays with just one.

Lolita's Humbert Humbert is a classic example of which kind of narrator?

An unreliable narrator leaves the reader to judge what really happened, since Humbert tells his crimes his own way. The critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term in 1961.

What is an iamb?

An unstressed syllable then a stressed one: da-DUM, as in 'above'. In ancient Greece this rhythm was the metre of insult and lampoon, used that way since the poet Archilochus.

A line of pentameter is measured as five of which units?

Feet. The name is usually traced to a foot raised and lowered in beating time or dancing; with feet of two syllables, a pentameter line runs to about ten syllables.

Which 14th-century poet is credited with bringing iambic pentameter into English verse?

Geoffrey Chaucer took the five-beat line from French and Italian poetry. Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's The Prelude all went on to use it.

Which poetic form uses unrhymed iambic pentameter?

Blank verse came into English when the Earl of Surrey translated Virgil's Aeneid without rhyme. Marlowe and then Shakespeare made it the voice of the English stage.

Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle into that good night' is a famous example of which form?

A villanelle now means nineteen lines bound by two refrains, but the name began with rustic Italian dance-songs that had no fixed form at all.

What is the strict rhyme scheme of a limerick?

AABBA: lines one, two and five rhyme, and the shorter third and fourth pair off. The name is said to come from a party song, sung between improvised verses, with the refrain 'Will you come up to Limerick?'

Which Victorian writer popularised the limerick with A Book of Nonsense (1846)?

Edward Lear made the form famous but never called it a limerick. Nonsense was a sideline: he earned his living as an artist, hired by the London Zoological Society to draw its birds.

Mrs. Malaprop, who gave her name to the malapropism, appears in which 1775 play?

The Rivals has Mrs. Malaprop say 'contagious countries' when she means contiguous ones. Sheridan made her name from the French 'mal à propos', meaning out of place.

Which verbal slip is named after an Oxford college warden?

A spoonerism honours William Spooner, warden of New College. Most of the famous ones are probably apocryphal, though he did own up to announcing a hymn as 'Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take'.

Which Russian playwright advised that a gun hung on the wall in act one must go off later?

Anton Chekhov made the point more than once: an 1889 letter warns against putting a loaded rifle on stage if no one means to fire it. Writers now call the rule Chekhov's gun.

Saying 'wheels' for a car or 'boots' for soldiers uses which figure of speech?

Synecdoche names a thing by one of its parts, as sailors once counted 'ten sail' for ten ships. It can also run the other way, with the whole standing in for a part.

Guinness World Records lists the 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias as the longest known example of what?

A palindrome reads the same backwards as forwards, and this one names a kind of Finnish trader. The trick is ancient: the Sator Square, a five-word Latin palindrome, turned up in the ruins of Pompeii.

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known English example of what?

A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet, which made this one a standard line for testing keyboards and teleprinters. In 1963 a version of it was the first message sent over the Moscow-Washington hotline.

Who coined the term 'euphemism treadmill' for polite words that turn taboo and get replaced?

Steven Pinker's treadmill never stops: 'toilet' was itself once the genteel word, taken from the French for a dressing cloth, before it needed polite replacements of its own.

Which Dr. Seuss book was written to win a bet that he could not use just 50 different words?

Green Eggs and Ham won Dr. Seuss a $50 wager with his editor, Bennett Cerf. His earlier hit The Cat in the Hat had needed 236 different words.

In Harry Potter, 'Tom Marvolo Riddle' rearranges into 'I am Lord Voldemort', making the name which kind of wordplay?

An anagram uses every letter of a word or phrase again in a new order. Translators often had to rename the character so that the trick still worked in other languages.

Which word for passing off another writer's work as your own comes from the Latin for 'kidnapper'?

Plagiarism goes back to plagiarius, the word the Roman poet Martial threw at a rival he accused of 'kidnapping' his verses.

Which American author took his pen name from a riverboat call meaning the water was two fathoms deep?

Mark Twain was the leadsman's cry for two fathoms, safe water for a steamboat. Samuel Clemens knew it from his years as a Mississippi river pilot.

The title of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 names the temperature at which what is said to catch fire?

Book paper is what the novel's firemen are paid to burn, because owning books is a crime. Bradbury picked 451 degrees after asking at what temperature paper ignites.

Which London playhouse, built by Shakespeare's company, burned down after a stage cannon misfired in 1613?

The Globe went up in flames when the cannon set light to its wooden beams and thatch during a performance. A reconstruction opened close to the original site in 1997.

What name did Anne Frank give the imaginary friend she addressed her diary entries to?

Kitty was the friend Anne Frank invented, and her entries open 'Dear Kitty'. She was given the diary for her thirteenth birthday, weeks before her family went into hiding.

Which American dictionary maker popularised spellings such as 'color' and 'center' over the British forms?

Noah Webster chose them for An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. He picked existing variants he thought simpler rather than inventing new ones.

In E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, what does Charlotte first weave into her web to save Wilbur?

Some Pig is the first of the spider's messages, and 'Terrific', 'Radiant' and 'Humble' follow. She reasons that the farmer will never slaughter a famous animal.

Which fantasy novel did J. R. R. Tolkien begin by scribbling its first line on an empty exam page?

The Hobbit grew from one sentence, 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit', which Tolkien wrote on an empty page while marking school exams.

Which classic children's novel opens with the well-worn line 'It was a dark and stormy night'?

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, was turned down by at least 26 publishers, who found it 'too different'. Its opening line had first been made famous by an 1830 novel, Paul Clifford.

Which ancient Greek storyteller is credited with 'The Tortoise and the Hare' and 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf'?

Aesop is said to have been a slave on the island of Samos who was later freed. No writings by him survive, and the fables under his name were gathered over many centuries.

Which American poet wrote 'The Road Not Taken', which begins with two roads diverging in a yellow wood?

Robert Frost wrote it as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who could never decide which path to take on their walks. It is often misread as a hymn to going your own way.

Which term covers words such as 'their', 'there' and 'they're', which sound alike but differ in meaning?

Homophones can even share a spelling, like 'rose' the flower and 'rose' the past tense of rise. 'Rain', 'reign' and 'rein' make a three-way set.

Which 1818 novel was begun after Lord Byron challenged his friends to each write a ghost story?

Frankenstein was Mary Shelley's answer to that 1816 dare, made near Geneva. The same contest also produced The Vampyre, written by John Polidori.

'Scuba', 'laser' and 'radar' all began as which kind of word, built from the initial letters of a phrase?

Acronyms are pronounced as words in their own right. Scuba hides a whole phrase: 'self-contained underwater breathing apparatus'.

Daniel Handler wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events under which pen name, also the books' gloomy narrator?

Lemony Snicket is both the name on the cover and a character inside the story. The books follow the orphaned Baudelaire children as they flee the villainous Count Olaf.

In Rick Riordan's novels, which Greek god is the father of the demigod Percy Jackson?

Poseidon, god of the sea, makes Percy a demigod. Rick Riordan invented the hero in stories for his son, who has ADHD and dyslexia, and gave Percy both.

Which award, named for an 18th-century English publisher, honours the year's best American children's book?

The Newbery Medal, proposed in 1921, was the first children's book award in the world. A fifteen-person committee of the American Library Association picks the winner.

Which Greek philosopher's Rhetoric set out ethos, pathos and logos as the three ways to persuade an audience?

Aristotle gave each appeal its own target: ethos rests on the speaker's credibility, pathos on the listeners' emotions and logos on reasoning.

Which poet wrote 'Hope is the thing with feathers' yet saw only 10 of her poems published in her lifetime?

Emily Dickinson left nearly 1,800 poems, most of them unknown until her sister Lavinia found them in a desk after her death.

Which Harlem Renaissance poet asked 'What happens to a dream deferred?', inspiring the title of A Raisin in the Sun?

Langston Hughes asked it in his 1951 poem 'Harlem', which wonders whether such a dream dries up 'like a raisin in the sun'. Lorraine Hansberry took the image for her play.

Which writer took the title of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem?

Maya Angelou had admired Dunbar for years and found the line in his poem 'Sympathy'. She credited him, along with Shakespeare, with forming her ambition to write.

Which character tells most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as the detective's friend and biographer?

Dr. Watson recounts the cases himself, beginning with A Study in Scarlet. The device worked so well that later detective writers copied it with sidekicks of their own.

Who narrates Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, looking back on her childhood in Maycomb, Alabama?

Scout Finch is six when the story begins and tells it across three years of the Great Depression. Her given name is Jean Louise.

Which character in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books has a name that is the Turkish word for 'lion'?

Aslan is the great lion who watches over Narnia in all seven books. Lewis often capitalised the word 'Lion' when writing about him.

Which British physician began a word list in 1805 that became the best-known English thesaurus?

Peter Mark Roget compiled the list for his own use and published it only in 1852, years after retiring from medicine.

Walt Whitman is called the American father of which kind of poetry, with no regular meter or rhyme?

Free verse follows the rhythm of natural speech instead of a fixed pattern. It caught on widely in the early 1900s under its French name, vers libre.

Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe star in which American story genre, told as if its wild claims were true?

Tall tales credit the giant lumberjack with digging the Grand Canyon with his axe and making Minnesota's ten thousand lakes with his footprints.

Which Old English epic poem sends a hero of the Geats to fight the monster Grendel?

Beowulf sails to help the Danish king Hrothgar, whose hall Grendel has attacked for twelve years. The poem survives in a single copy, damaged by fire in 1731.

'Brunch', 'smog' and 'motel' are which kind of blended word, named after a two-part piece of luggage?

A portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two halves. Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty borrowed it to explain 'slithy', which packs 'slimy' and 'lithe' into one word.

Which kind of poem ends Through the Looking-Glass, its lines' first letters spelling Alice Pleasance Liddell?

An acrostic hides a message in the opening letters of its lines. This one spells the full name of the real girl after whom the book's heroine is named.

Which punctuation mark, a row of three dots, shows that words have been left out of a quotation?

An ellipsis takes its name from a Greek word meaning 'leave out'. Writers also use it to mark a pause or a sentence that trails away.

Which everyday word entered English from Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., built on the Czech for 'forced labour'?

Robot comes from robota, Czech for drudgery or forced labour. Čapek said the word was really the idea of his brother Josef, a painter and writer.

The Giver and The Hunger Games belong to which genre, named as the opposite of Thomas More's ideal society?

Dystopian fiction imagines a society gone wrong, flipping the 'utopia' that More named in 1516. John Stuart Mill used 'dystopia' as its opposite in an 1868 speech to Parliament.

Which American librarian devised the decimal system, first published in 1876, that sorts library books by subject?

Melvil Dewey worked out the scheme at the Amherst College library. A keen spelling reformer, he also trimmed his own first name down from 'Melville'.

Which word for a group of lines in a poem is also the everyday Italian word for 'room'?

Stanza is the poem's answer to a paragraph, usually set off from its neighbours by a line space. Italians themselves more often call the poetic unit a 'strofa'.

In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which object does Ralph blow like a horn to gather the stranded boys?

A conch shell summons the survivors and helps get Ralph elected chief. Late in the novel a boulder smashes it, and the last order on the island goes with it.

The longest word in major English dictionaries, a 45-letter coinage from 1935, names what kind of thing?

A lung disease caused by breathing in fine volcanic dust is what it means. The word was coined by Everett Smith, president of the National Puzzlers' League.

English belongs to which branch of the Indo-European language family, alongside Dutch, Frisian and Swedish?

Germanic is the branch English has belonged to since it emerged in early medieval England. Its nearest relatives after Scots are Frisian and Low Saxon.

Which punctuation mark is first attested in a 1496 book from the Venetian press of Aldus Manutius?

The semicolon turns up in De Aetna, a book by Pietro Bembo that Manutius printed in Venice. The same press later introduced italic type, in a 1501 edition of Virgil.

Which name is given to the ¶ symbol that editors and proofreaders use to mark a new paragraph?

The pilcrow probably owes its odd name to 'paragraph' itself, garbled over centuries of use. Word processors display it to show where each paragraph ends.

Which German literary term names a coming-of-age novel, such as The Catcher in the Rye?

Bildungsroman joins the German words for 'education' and 'novel'. The genre is usually dated to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, published in 1795–96.

Which term describes a book such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, told through letters, diaries and newspaper clippings?

Epistolary comes from a Greek word for a letter, the root of 'epistle'. Building a story from documents makes its events feel like real evidence.

Old English poets called the sea the 'whale's road' and the 'swan's road', examples of which poetic device?

Kennings replace a plain name with a two-part riddle, so the reader must work out that a whale's road is the sea. Old Norse poets were just as fond of them.

What is the small dot above a lowercase 'i' called, a word that the King James Bible pairs with 'jot'?

A tittle is the dot itself, and 'jot and tittle' still means every last small detail. In Matthew 5:18, not one of either is to pass from the law.

Which term for a misheard lyric comes from a writer's childhood mishearing of a Scottish ballad?

A mondegreen is named for 'Lady Mondegreen', whom Sylvia Wright heard as a girl in the ballad line 'laid him on the green'. She coined the word in a 1954 essay.

Which word for a worn-out phrase began as typesetters' jargon for a cast metal plate?

A cliché was a plate that could stamp out the same type or image again and again. The French word may echo the click the plate made as it was cast.

In his 1755 Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined which occupation as 'a harmless drudge'?

Lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, was Johnson's joke at his own expense. He compiled the whole work single-handedly, with only clerks to copy out quotations.

Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby runs to over 50,000 words without once using which letter?

E is the most common letter in English, which is what makes the feat so hard. Writing that deliberately avoids a letter is called a lipogram.