100 Fun Facts About Grammar

Traditional grammar divides English words into how many parts of speech?

Noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, verb, preposition, conjunction and interjection; modern grammars add determiners and others.

Which part of speech expresses emotion, as in 'oops'?

A conjunction connects words or clauses, and an adverb describes a verb, adjective or another adverb.

Roughly how many irregular verbs does English have?

Regular verbs take -ed for both past tense and participle; the irregular ones include the most common verbs in the language.

'Went' was originally the past tense of which verb before it was borrowed by 'go'?

The process is called suppletion, and it is why 'go' has such a strange past tense.

Which four moods does English have?

Ancient Greek also had an optative mood, and Arabic a jussive.

'If I were the teacher, I would not give too much homework' is an example of which mood?

Fixed phrases like 'God save the King' and 'be that as it may' preserve the same construction.

Which English modal verbs make up the core set?

Ought, had better, and sometimes dare and need are counted as marginal modals.

The serial comma is nicknamed after Horace Hart, who wrote the style rules for which publishing house?

Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers of 1905 became the press's house style guide.

A missing serial comma decided a Maine overtime lawsuit that settled for how much in 2017?

Truck drivers argued that 'packing for shipment or distribution' was ambiguous without the comma, and the court agreed.

The Star Trek phrase 'to boldly go' is the classic example of what?

Henry Alford's 1864 Plea for the Queen's English helped make the construction taboo, though Fowler and others defended it.

The quip 'This is the sort of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put' mocks which supposed rule?

It is apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill; the rule itself dates to John Dryden's 1672 objection to a Ben Jonson line.

Which poet's 1672 complaint about a Ben Jonson phrase made preposition-stranding a grammatical sin?

Grammarian Joshua Poole had grumbled about it earlier in the 17th century, but Dryden made it fashionable to object.

The word apostrophe comes from Greek meaning what?

Geoffroy Tory introduced it into French printing in 1529 to show a dropped vowel, as in l'heure.

What is the superfluous mark in market signs like 'apple's 50p' commonly called?

The Apostrophe Protection Society campaigned against them from 2001 until it gave up in 2019.

Who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001, and what happened to it?

Its founder was awarded an Ig Nobel prize for his efforts.

The semicolon first appears in a 1496 book by Pietro Bembo, printed by which Venetian printer?

Manutius's press also gave the world italic type and the pocket-sized book.

What is Project Semicolon?

The idea is that a semicolon continues a sentence rather than ending it, so the tattoo is usually on the wrist.

The interrobang, combining a question mark and an exclamation point, was proposed in 1962 by whom?

He thought ads would look better with a single mark for surprised rhetorical questions; some Remington typewriters got a key for it in 1968.

What is the upside-down interrobang called?

It serves Spanish, which opens questions and exclamations with inverted marks.

The name ampersand comes from schoolchildren slurring which phrase?

The & sign was once taught as the 27th letter of the alphabet, and the slurred name was in common use by 1837.

The ampersand was long taught to children as what?

The symbol itself is a ligature of the Latin word et.

The palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw Elba' was implausibly attributed to whom?

It was coined by a certain 'J.T.R.' in 1848; 'A man, a plan, a canal – Panama' followed in 1948.

According to Guinness, what is the world's longest palindromic term in everyday use?

It means a soapstone vendor; the longest English one, tattarrattat, comes from Joyce's Ulysses.

Which musician's song 'Bob' is composed entirely of palindromes?

It parodies Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' with lines like 'Do geese see God?'

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

It contains every letter of the alphabet, which is why typewriter tests and font samples use it.

Which 32-letter pangram, with only six duplicated vowels, is often cited as among the most efficient?

A perfect pangram uses each letter exactly once, which in English requires obscure words.

A word like 'dust', which can mean both to remove dust and to add it, is called what?

Other names include auto-antonym and Janus word, after the two-faced Roman god; 'sanction' and 'cleave' are classic examples.

Why is a word with two opposite meanings also called a Janus word?

'Fast' can mean fixed in place or moving quickly, and 'left' once meant both lucky and unlucky.

Which pronoun did Merriam-Webster name Word of the Year in 2019?

The American Dialect Society had chosen singular they in 2015 and named it Word of the Decade for the 2010s.

The Chicago Manual of Style cited singular they's 'venerable use' by which of these writers?

Its 1993 edition listed Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott and Shakespeare.

A grammatical sentence made of eight repetitions of one word uses the name of which city?

It uses buffalo as a proper noun, a common noun for bison, and a verb meaning to bully; Dmitri Borgmann popularised it in 1967.

'The horse raced past the barn fell' is a famous example of what?

Readers parse it wrongly at first and must reanalyse; the example is attributed to psycholinguist Thomas Bever.

What animal features in the joke behind the title of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves?

The panda reads a badly punctuated wildlife guide; the 2003 book became a New York Times bestseller in the US.

Who wrote the first edition of The Elements of Style, in 1918?

His former student E. B. White revised it in 1959, producing the 'little book' Time later ranked among the century's most influential.

Which linguist argued that Strunk and White misunderstood the passive voice?

Pullum also objected to their rule against 'which' in restrictive clauses.

What is joining two independent clauses with only a punctuation mark, as in 'I came, I saw', called?

A run-on joins them with no punctuation at all; both Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jolley used splices deliberately.

'Turning the corner, a handsome school building appeared' illustrates which error?

Strunk and White insist an opening participle phrase must refer to the grammatical subject, and here the building is doing the turning.

The word portmanteau, for a blend like 'brunch' or 'smog', was first used in this sense in which book?

Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that 'slithy' packs 'lithe' and 'slimy' into one word, like a two-part suitcase.

Which African country chose a portmanteau name in 1964 when two territories merged?

Tanganyika and Zanzibar became Tanzania; Oxbridge and Brexit are English cousins.

Which bird's name has kept roughly its Anglo-Saxon pronunciation because it imitates the bird's call?

Onomatopoeic words resist sound change; furrow, by contrast, shifted its vowels over the centuries.

How many tones does Mandarin use to distinguish otherwise homophonous syllables?

Homophones spelled differently, like 'there' and 'their', are also called heterographs.

Which grammarian first tentatively suggested the fewer/less distinction, in 1770?

It was a personal preference that later grammarians hardened into a rule.

In 2008, British supermarket Tesco replaced its '10 or less' express-checkout signs with what wording?

The wording sidestepped the fewer-versus-less argument entirely.

What is the Sator Square?

'Sator arepo tenet opera rotas' has been found scratched on walls from Pompeii to Britain.

The oldest known grammar handbook, the Art of Grammar, was written by which ancient Greek scholar?

It remained the main grammar textbook for Greek schoolboys until the twelfth century AD, and the Romans modelled their own guides on it.

The ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini is famous for which foundational Sanskrit text?

European scholars who encountered it in the 19th century dubbed him the 'first descriptive linguist'.

Which language has required an opening inverted question mark before questions since 1754?

The rule came in with the second edition of the Real Academia Española's Ortografía.

The exclamation mark most likely evolved from which Latin word of joy?

Writers placed it at the ends of sentences, then stacked the 'I' above a shrinking 'O' until the modern mark emerged.

How did users of older typewriters without an exclamation key produce the mark?

Printers meanwhile called the mark a screamer, gasper, slammer or startler.

Which operating system popularised 'bang' as the programmers' name for the exclamation mark?

Programmers had earlier called it 'shriek'; the 'bang' nickname was already used in 1950s American typesetting manuals.

Who wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar, the influential 1762 textbook?

Lowth, later Bishop of London, culled his examples of 'false syntax' from Shakespeare, Milton, Swift and the King James Bible.

To whom did H. W. Fowler dedicate his 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage?

Francis had co-written The King's English with him in 1906 and died of tuberculosis in 1918 after serving in the First World War.

The paragraph mark ¶ grew out of a letter C standing for which Latin word?

Capitulum means 'little head'; medieval scribes drew the mark in red ink to flag a new train of thought before paragraph breaks existed.

Workers at which company coined 'octothorpe' for the # key by 1968?

They needed names for the two extra keys, # and *, being added to the touch-tone telephone keypad; the word first reached a US patent in 1973.

Which US magazine still spells 'coöperate' with two dots over the second o?

The diaeresis signals that the vowels belong to separate syllables; most publications long ago switched to a hyphen or nothing at all.

In which language does the question mark look exactly like an English semicolon?

Unicode gives the Greek mark its own code point but normalises it to the ordinary semicolon, so the two are identical in practice.

'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' appeared in which 1957 book by Noam Chomsky?

Its point was that a sentence can be perfectly grammatical yet meaningless, unlike its reversed twin 'Furiously sleep ideas green colorless'.

The term 'eggcorn', for a misheard phrase like 'old-timers' disease', comes from mishearing what?

The name was suggested on the Language Log blog in 2003 after a woman was found writing 'egg corn' for the nut.

Sylvia Wright coined 'mondegreen' in 1954 after mishearing a line from what kind of source?

She heard 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen'; Merriam-Webster finally added the word in 2008.

Swapping the first sounds of words, as in 'blushing crow', is named after which kind of slip?

The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford, was reportedly prone to it; 'runny babbit' is another classic.

Mrs Malaprop, in Sheridan's 1775 comedy The Rivals, gave her name to which kind of error?

Shakespeare's Constable Dogberry made the same mistakes two centuries earlier, so the error is also called a Dogberryism.

Inserting a word inside another, as in 'abso-bloody-lutely', is called what?

Ovid used it as a poetic device in the Metamorphoses; in English the inserted word is usually an expletive.

Saying 'octopi' is a hypercorrection that wrongly treats 'octopus' as a word from which language?

The word is Greek, so the pedant's plural would be octopodes; plain octopuses is the safest choice.

The name of the schwa, the unstressed 'uh' vowel, comes from which language?

It reached English via German; the IPA symbol ə is simply a rotated lowercase e.

The International Phonetic Association was founded in 1886 by teachers led by which linguist?

The group of French and English language teachers only adopted the name International Phonetic Association in 1897.

In Esperanto, every noun ends with which letter?

Adjectives end in -a and present-tense verbs in -as, so a word's part of speech is visible at a glance; plurals add -j.

The 'Ye' in 'Ye Olde Shoppe' comes from printers substituting y for which lost English letter?

Early type sets lacked the letter, so 'ye' was always pronounced 'the'; the 1611 King James Bible used it in places.

French « » quotation marks are called guillemets, a diminutive of which name?

The printer Guillaume Le Bé gets the credit, though the marks first appeared in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.

Henry Denham's reversed ⸮ mark of the 1580s was meant to end what kind of sentence?

It is now called the percontation point; it never caught on, but Unicode still encodes it.

A text that deliberately avoids a letter, like the E-less 1939 novel Gadsby, is called what?

Ernest Vincent Wright could not use any number between six and thirty, since all of their names contain an e.

'Dord', the ghost word that slipped into Webster's 1934 dictionary, was defined as what?

A slip reading 'D or d, cont./density' was meant to list D as an abbreviation, but was typeset as a word.

Spaces between written words first appeared in 7th- and 8th-century Bibles from where?

Greek and Latin had been written as scriptio continua, one unbroken stream of letters, because speech itself has no gaps.

In linguistics, an asterisk before a sentence signals that it is what?

The convention began in historical linguistics for reconstructed forms nobody ever saw written down, then spread to ill-formed sentences.

The dagger † and the division sign ÷ both descend from the obelus, Greek for what?

Ancient editors drew it beside lines they thought spurious, as if skewering the dubious text.

Which three-dot mark takes its name from the Greek for 'leave out'?

The Chicago Manual of Style wants each of the three periods separated by a non-breaking space.

In pairs like 'tick-tock' and 'zig-zag', the first vowel is almost always which sound?

The pattern is called ablaut reduplication, and it even governs three-part runs like tic-tac-toe and bish-bash-bosh.

In English's usual adjective order ('nice little old round house'), which type comes first?

Native speakers follow the sequence without ever being taught it, which is why 'old little house' sounds wrong.

An em dash is so named because its width matches what?

Typesetters also call it a mutton dash, and the half-width en dash a nut dash.

Using two negatives to make a weakened positive, as in 'not unhappy', is called what?

In many dialects and languages a second negative intensifies rather than cancels, as in Chaucer's 'He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde'.

Which word's softened entry in Webster's Third (1961) drew particular scorn from critics?

The previous edition had labelled it 'illiterate'; the Globe and Mail warned the change would 'comfort the ignorant'.

Animal-group names like 'a pride of lions' are traditionally called terms of what?

Venery means hunting; the 1486 Book of Saint Albans lists 164 such terms, including jokes like 'a doctrine of doctors'.

'Children' was formed by adding -en to which earlier plural of 'child'?

That makes it a double plural; 'brethren' and 'oxen' are the other -en survivors in everyday use.

About 45% of the world's languages, including Latin and Persian, use which basic word order?

English's subject–verb–object pattern is a close second at roughly 42%; object-first orders are vanishingly rare.

Klingon's usual word order is the exact reverse of English's. What is it?

Marc Okrand chose typologically rare features on purpose so the language would sound alien; the 1985 Klingon Dictionary laid it out.

Sonja Lang's minimalist language Toki Pona is built from roughly how many words?

The 2014 book Toki Pona: The Language of Good presents the core; a later dictionary lists 137 'essential' words.

Who wrote the first printed grammar of English, Bref Grammar of English (1586)?

He modelled it on William Lily's Latin grammar and also campaigned for a reformed phonetic spelling.

Which Roman grammarian, author of the medieval staple Ars minor, taught St Jerome?

Ars minor was by far the most used grammar textbook between 400 and 1500, and 'donat' became a Middle English word for any primer.

Perec's E-less 1969 novel La Disparition appeared in English under what title?

Gilbert Adair's translation kept the constraint; Perec then wrote Les Revenentes using no vowel except E.

The nonsense phrase 'etaoin shrdlu' comes from the keyboard of which machine?

Operators ran a finger down the first two columns to fill out a botched line, and the slug sometimes made it into print.

'Irregardless' is thought to blend 'regardless' with which word?

The OED traces it to western Indiana in 1912, though it was in use in South Carolina earlier still.

The earliest recorded use of 'literally' as a mere intensifier dates to which year?

Frances Brooke wrote that a man was 'literally to feed among the lilies'; a 1909 blacklist of literary faults already condemned the habit.

Which style guide dropped its ban on 'hopefully' meaning 'it is hoped' in 2012?

A 1969 American Heritage panel found only half of its editors objected to the usage; by 1999 the figure was around 80%.

'Muphry's law' holds that anything written criticising editing will contain what?

John Bangsund of Australia's Society of Editors set it out in 1992; the misspelling of Murphy is deliberate.

The 'Cupertino effect' is named after old spell checkers mangling which word?

Their dictionaries knew only the hyphenated 'co-operation', which is how official documents came to mention 'Regional Cupertino'.

'Snowclone', for a fill-in-the-blank cliché, was coined in 2004 by a professor of what?

Glen Whitman answered a Language Log appeal for a name; the word nods to the old chestnut about Inuit words for snow.

Which Schoolhouse Rock! song explains the words 'and', 'but' and 'or'?

It belonged to the Grammar Rock season of 1973–75 and marked jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon's debut on the series.

What is the smallest meaningful unit of language, such as the -s in 'cats'?

Those that can stand alone, like 'cat', are free; affixes like plural -s are bound to a root.

The modern comma descends from which medieval mark used to show a pause?

The virgula suspensiva served from the 13th to the 17th century; the word comma itself is Greek for a piece cut off.

The punctuation term colon comes from a Greek word meaning what?

In rhetoric a kolon was a section of a complete thought; Aristophanes of Byzantium supposedly marked its end with a middot.

The word hyphen comes from a Greek phrase meaning what?

The original Greek sign was a small tie drawn beneath two letters to show they belonged to one word, in the days before word spacing.