Word Fun

I read English at Oxford, and I’m fascinated by words. This article is a list of fun facts about the language, along with a quiz featuring words with unique properties and curious origins.

The English Language

Approximately 400 million people speak English as their first language. This makes it the third most spoken native language globally, trailing only Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. If you include those who speak English as a second or foreign language, the total number of speakers rises to over 1.5 billion people!

There’s no official count, but there are probably more than a million words in the English language. Here are a few more fun facts:

  • new words (‘coinages’) added to dictionaries every year: 4,000
  • new words invented by Shakespeare: over 1,000 (including swagger, cold-blooded and birthplace)
  • unique words appearing in a single edition of The Times: 6,000-8,000
  • words in the active vocabulary of a native adult English speaker: 20,000-35,000
  • words in current use: 171,000
  • words and phrases in the Oxford English Dictionary: 500,000.

Word Quiz

  1. Which word has 645 different meanings?
  2. Which word has all the vowels in alphabetical order?
  3. What’s the longest word without any vowels?
  4. Where does the word OK or okay come from?
  5. Which word did the Poetry Society of America and language app Babbel vote the most beautiful in the English language in 2026?
  6. What’s the longest word in the English language?
  7. What’s the most commonly misspelt word in English?
  8. Which common words have no rhymes?
  9. What’s the oldest word in the English language?
  10. What are the top 10 most common words in English?

Answers

  1. run
  2. facetious (or facetiously if you count the letter ‘y’ as a semi-vowel)
  3. twyndyllyngs, meaning twins (or rhythms in common usage!)
  4. OK was a sarcastic misspelling of the initials of ‘All Correct’/’Orl Korrect’ that first appeared in print on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post. During the 1840 presidential election, supporters of Martin Van Buren used the slogan “Vote for OK,” playing on both ‘Orl Korrect’ and Van Buren’s hometown nickname, Old Kinderhook.
  5. diaphanous, meaning delicate and translucent, followed by ethereal and mellifluous
  6. Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl… refers to the chemical composition of titin. It has 189,819 letters and takes two or three hours to pronounce in full! The runners-up are pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters), Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (36 letters), supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (34 letters) and antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters)
  7. While there isn’t a single official most misspelt word, definitely (often spelt definately), separate (often spelt seperate), and embarrass (often spelt embarass) consistently top dictionaries’ most-searched lists.
  8. Purple, orange, silver, month etc…
  9. I
  10. the, of, and, to, a, in, is, you, that and it

Leave a Reply