The word therein contains thirteen words spelled with consecutive letters: the, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein, and herein.
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SWIMS is the longest word with 180-degree rotational symmetry (if you were to view it upside-down it would still be the same word and perfectly readable).
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Unprosperousness is the longest word in which no letter occurs only once.
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www as an abbreviation for World Wide Web has nine spoken syllables, whereas the term being abbreviated has only three spoken syllables.
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Ultrarevolutionaries has each vowel exactly twice.
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Facetious and Abstemious contain the five vowels in alphabetical order.
Subcontinental, uncomplimentary and duoliteral contain the five vowels in reverse alphabetical order.
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Pliers is a word with no singular form. Other such words are: alms, cattle, eaves and scissors.
The shortest sentence in the English language is Go!
Acceded, baggage, cabbage, defaced, effaced and feedbag are seven-letter words that can be played on a musical instrument.
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The word dude was coined by Oscar Wilde and his friends. It is a combination of the words duds and attitude.
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Princes is the only plural word which can be made singular by adding an s (it becomes princess)
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Hijinks is the only word in common usage with three dotted letters in a row.
Earthling is first found in print in 1593. Other surprisingly old words are spaceship (1894), acid rain (1858), antacid (1753), hairdresser (1771), mole (in connection with espionage, 1622, by Sir Francis Bacon), funk (a strong smell, 1623; a state of panic, 1743), Milky Way (c. 1384, but earlier in Latin) and Ms. (used instead of Miss or Mrs., 1949).
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Ewe and You are pronounced exactly the same, yet share no letters in common.
WHERE’S IT FROM?
THE QUESTION MARK
Punctuation is a relatively recent invention. Western and Middle Eastern languages didn’t have punctuation at all and even the Assyrians and the Babylonians only put a space at the end of each sentence. Otherwise, all words just ellided into one another. This changed at the start of the seventh century when the Church, worried that priests pausing in the wrong place might convey the wrong message to their congregations, ordered dots and squiggles to be inserted into manuscripts. At the start of the ninth century, Charlemagne’s court standardized punctuation and interrogatory sentences were indicated by a full stop with a tilde (~) over it. This, of course, looks a lot like our question mark and so it evolved.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
—Mark Twain
WHERE’S IT FROM?
WHY COLONEL IS PRONOUNCED ‘KERNEL’
A colonel is a senior officer in the army. The word comes from the Old Italian word colonello (meaning commander of troops, which in turn derived from the Italian word for ‘column’).
Like so many words, the word came into English through the French. However — and this is where it gets more complicated — it came through as two separate words: colonel and coronel. The word ‘coronel’ was eventually pronounced as ‘kernel’. Then someone decided that the word should be spelled the way it was originally and so it should be ‘colonel’. The word was now spelled as ‘colonel’ but still pronounced as ‘coronel’ or ‘kernel’.