Facts about English
Intermediate to higher level English (B1-C2)

To mark the start of 2014, here are some facts to know about English.

– There are about 130 useful irregular verbs in English. This is not a large number but these verbs are used quite a lot so they are definitely worth learning.

– In English there are about 250,000 different words. There are many more if you include words that have multiple meanings. You can estimate how many English words you know by seeing how many words you understand in a few pages of a large English dictionary. For example if you know about 5 words per page and the dictionary has 1000 pages, you will know about 5,000 words. Don’t be surprised if you already know thousands of English words!

– The word ‘almost‘ has all its letters in alphabetical order.

– Scientists at Reading University have analysed how words change in the Indo-European family of languages (e.g. Spanish, Russian, English and Hindi). They found that numbers (1,2,3,4 …) change the least, followed by pronouns, nouns and verbs. Conjunctions and prepositions (e.g. ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘on’, ‘over’) change the most over time. Very old words in English include ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘who’.

– ‘ough‘ can be pronounced in lots of different ways. Try saying these words:
cough, dough, rough, plough, slough, thought, hiccouphed, borough, through

– Some proverbs contradict each other:
‘Out of sight, out of mind’ AND ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’
‘If you want something done right, do it yourself’ AND ‘Two heads are better than one’

– English words are borrowed by other languages but English has borrowed many foreign words too:
robot (from Czech)
golf (from Dutch)
sandal (Persian)
yogurt (Turkish)
tycoon (Japanese)