25 Fascinating Facts About the English Language

English is a linguistic patchwork of Germanic, French, Latin, Greek, and countless other influences. This history explains many of the language's most confusing features and reveals surprising facts about the words we use every day.

Size and Vocabulary

The Oxford English Dictionary contains approximately 170,000 words currently in use and 47,000 obsolete words. English has more words than most languages due to its habit of borrowing liberally rather than constructing compounds from native roots (as German typically does). The average educated English speaker knows 20,000 to 35,000 words and uses 5,000 to 10,000 regularly.

The Most Common Words

The most common word in English is "the," accounting for approximately 7% of all written words. The top 100 words account for roughly half of all written English. Word game insight: this is why E tiles are worth only one point in Scrabble while Q and Z are worth ten. Frequency determines value.

Silent Letters and Why They Exist

Silent letters in English (the K in knight, the B in debt) were once pronounced. Over centuries of language evolution, the pronunciation changed while spelling was preserved. The word "knight" was once pronounced with a hard K and a throaty GH sound similar to modern German "Knecht."

The Longest Sentence Without a Letter

Many shorter paragraphs have been written avoiding the letter E, the most common letter in English. Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a 50,000-word novel "Gadsby" (1939) without using the letter E once. This is called a lipogram.