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Fun Facts About The English Alphabet
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Fun Facts About The English Alphabet My love for the English language started when I was quite young. I adored doing crossword puzzles and playing Scrabble. Today, I continue to play various online word games and am very competitive! Thought you might enjoy these interesting facts...… Quick! Try naming five words that start with the letter L: lollipop, lazy, long, love, liquid, language…and the list goes on and on. Now, try naming five words that start with the letter X: xylophone, x-ray, xenia …not so easy, right? Still racking your brain for more words that start with an X? You might want to stop because the Oxford English Dictionary only contains 400 words that begin with the letter X. In Noah Webster’s Compendious Dictionary, which he published in 1806, there was only one word listed under the letter X: xebec, which meant, “a small three-masted vessel in the Mediterranean.” In 1828, when he put together his American Dictionary, that had only risen to 13. The of words starting with the letter X continued to rise until it reached the 400 that we have today. Now, can you guess the most common letters in the English language? Those hours of watching Wheel of Fortune might just pay off. The most common letter in the English language is the letter E. E is everywhere. In an analysis of all 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the letter E appears in approximately 11% of all words in the common English vocabulary, about 6,000 more words than the runner-up letter, A. Did you know, E is the most commonly struck letter on your keyboard, and the second most popular key after the space bar. And for my American friends, there’s only one letter that’s not in any U.S. State Name. Can You Guess It? Hmmm, 50 states, only 25 letters. Which one's missing? The answer is…Q. That’s right. 50 different names, and not one of them contains the letter Q. And, every very other letter shows up at least once. If you guessed J or Z, though, you were close, and probably don’t live in New Jersey or Arizona, since those are the only states that contain J and Z respectively. There are a couple of other rare letters, too, that only show up twice. No states but Alabama and Nebraska have a B in their name, and California and Florida are the only state names that contain F. If X was your guess, you were also close but it is in New Mexico and Texas. The only other letter with fewer than five appearances might surprise you: P! It’s only in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Mississippi (the latter’s double-P bumps it up to four appearances, even though it’s only in three state names). Hope you enjoyed these fascinating facts.  |
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Do you know any other quirks about the English alphabet?
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Language and expression are indeed treasures to be cherished.
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How do you feel about the way languages are evolving? I see they recently added the word "emoji" to the dictionary but with some people now communicating almost entirely in wee pictures, do you despair at this or just see it as another step forward in the never-ending progression? Do grammatical errors bother you too? "I went and brought a new car and left it over their". Do you think the younger generation with their emojis are losing the grammar skills that the previous generations were taught?
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Interesting post! I always like to read about these lesser-known aspects of the English language.
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9/25/2018 8:43 am |
I am feeling so.......enlightened...........Just a thought but I thought I read somewhere there was something like eighty thousand French words introduced into the English language after the Normans invaded England.
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did you see that they've just added another 300 words to the official scrabble dictionary? I dunno, it seems like dumbing down to me.
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Great stuff. What is a word that begins with 'he' and ends with 'he' and is longer than 2 letters?
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