10 bamboozling English facts

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A/N- If you don't get the picture, it's a famous line from a Hindi movie :)

1. "I am" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. 

2. A pangram sentence is one that contains every letter in the language. 

3. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not the longest word in the English language. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (pronounced nyoo-muh-now-uhl-truh-mai-kruh-sko-puhk-si·luh-kow-vol·kei-now-kow-nuh-ow-suhs) is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and dust. 

4. Shakespeare added over 1,000 words to the English language. 

5. Many languages have "grammatical gender." For example, Spanish speakers use the gender articles el and la (the) depending on whether a noun is masculine or feminine. English used to have grammatical gender, but doesn't anymore.

6. Editors from the Oxford English Dictionary have estimated that about 4000 new words are added to the dictionary every year. That means a new word about every two hours!

7. The United States of America is the world's largest English-speaking country. Approximately 225 million Americans speak English as a first language, while 43 million speak it as a second language. That's a grand total of 268 million English speakers which makes the USA, a country with the largest number of English speaking population.

8. India is the world's second largest English speaking country, with 125 million English speakers. But only 226,449 of those speak it as a first language. For the rest, it's a second language. However, many Indians speak "not so much English as Hinglish'', also known as Indian English, which is a mix of English and Hindi.

9. A portmanteau is a word that blends the sounds of two English words to make a new word that combines their meanings.

10. A palindrome is a word or phrase that's spelled the same whether you read left-to-right (like normal) or right-to-left. An example word is madam or swims.

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Which one of these surprised you? Which ones did you find mind-boggling? Comment!

If you have any feedback or suggestions that I could use to make this book better, feel free to message me with them!

Stay safe :)

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