Words: Fascinating Facts Friday

As a writer, I love words. So for today's Fascinating Facts Friday I looked for interesting facts about words.

My Favorites

- The word 'set' has the most definitions among all the English language words in existence.

- The longest words without vowels are rhythm and syzygy (which means the alignment of 3 celestial bodies: the moon, the earth and the sun).
Note: Funny, I thought our English teachers always taught us that the vowels were a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y. That would lead me to believe these words in fact do have vowels.

- The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Note: Clearly it caught on with the kids, the hip word of the day!

- Uncopyrightable is the only word in the English language that doesn't repeat any letter and is 15 letters long.
Note: Funny, my spell checker flags uncopyrightable.

- Angry and Hungry are the only two meaningful words that end with 'gry'
Note: This one makes perfect sense to me, because I'm often angry when I'm hungry!

- The shortest complete sentence in the English language is "I am".
Note: And what a powerful sentence it is.

- There are no words that rhyme with month, orange, silver and purple.

- Only 4 words end in -dous: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous and hazardous.

- There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, here, ere, therein, herein.

 

- The word "testify" was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles. Note: Would women boobify or vaginify?

- The letters H, I, O, and X are the only letters that look the same if you flip them upside down or view them from behind.

- The highest scoring word in the game Scrabble is "quartzy".
Note: I love Scrabble, so I was super-excited to find this fact. I know, I'm a nerd!

Which of the above was most interesting to you?