Interesting facts about English

To help our students to love English, teachers should motivate them to learn it. One of the ways to do this, is to describe the English language as an interesting one full of curious things. 

·                          David Crystal, in his book The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Buy it), suggests that there are at least a million words in the English language. If all scientific terms were counted, the total could be two million, not including the names for organisms;

·                          Over 60 percent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots;

·                          The word "pet" is borrowed from the Scots Gaelic word "peat", meaning "tame animal". The word "shampoo" is borrowed from the Indian (Hindi) word "chāmpo", meaning "head massage". The word "tea" is thought to come from the Chinese (Amoy) word which meant "tea";

·                          Shakespeare used around 20,000 different words. Estimates of Shakespeare’s vocabulary vary, as different people have different views on what counts as a word;

·                          The word "sandwich" is said to have come into the English language in 1762 when John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, ordered a waiter to bring him roast beef between two slices of bread. He was playing cards at the time and didn’t want to have to stop to eat so he asked for the meat to be placed between slices of bread so that his hands didn't get greasy;

·                          The word "set" has 464 definitions. "Go" has 368, "take" 343;

·                          "The" is the most commonly used word in English; "of" is the second and "to" is the third;

·                          There aren't any words that rhyme with "purple";

·                          The first word spoken on the moon was "okay";

·                          English is the language which is spoken by the greatest number of people in the world as a second language (around 350 million);

·                          English is described as the official language of more than 50 countries;