Saturday, July 1, 2017

Additional insights from The Weird World of Words

Here are some other things I learned this afternoon that should be interesting to writers/authors/readers/reviewers/etc. while breezing through Mitchell Symons' The Weird World of Words A Guided Tour-

"John Milton used 8,000 different words in Paradise Lost."

"The average reader can read 275 words per minute."

"The vocabulary of the average person consists of 5,000 to 6,000 words." (So, if you're hearing the same thing from someone over and over again, you probably are.)

"The nine words: the, of, and. to, it. you, be, have, and will make up a quarter of all the words used in English."

"Accommodate is the most misspelled word in English."

"Strengthlessness, eighteen letters long, is the longest word in the English language with just one (repeated) vowel."

"The only fifteen-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable."

"Just 1,000 words make up 90 percent of all writing."

Fascinating fact because for many of us this has a local connection- "Dr. Seuss invented the word nerd for his 1950 book If I Ran The Zoo."

"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words."

And because you've probably always wondered about this, "Aphthongs are silent letters (in words such as the 'k' in know and the 'p' in psychology.)

And, bear with me here, a little history of where it's from:

Ever wonder about the words blog and blogger? Here's the history in a nutshell:  "It was an American blogger-one John Barger- who set the blog rolling when he started what he called a 'weblog' in 1997 on the basis that he was 'logging the web.' Almost immediately, another American (Peter Merholz) broke the word 'weblog' into 'we blog' and later just 'blog.' From blog to blogger was inevitable."

So- always play with your words and have fun- you're a writer or author, after all! No license is required to have fun with words!

No comments:

Post a Comment