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The expression ‘to knuckle down’ originated from the children’s game of marbles. Players would put their knuckles to the ground in order to make their best shots.
We pronounce the combination ‘o-u-g-h’ in nine different ways. This sentence contains them all: ‘A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.’
A preposition links nouns, pronouns and phrases to other words in a sentence. A preposition is always followed by a noun, proper noun, pronoun, noun group or gerund.
The past tense of ‘dare’ is ‘durst’. However, the word is archaic and no longer widely used.
As a noun, an owl is ‘a night bird of prey’. However, as a verb it means ‘to act wisely, despite knowing nothing’. Informally, in its verb form, to owl can also mean ‘to stay up late’.
There are only four words in the English language that end in ‘dous’. They are: hazardous, horrendous, stupendous and tremendous.
A scissor was originally a type of Roman gladiator thought to have been armed either with a pair of swords or blades, or with a single dual-bladed dagger.
The most common adjective in the English language is ‘good’. The most common noun is ‘time’, and the most common word used in conversation is ‘I’.
Bamboozle derives from a French word, embabouiner, meaning ‘to make a baboon out of someone’. To metagrobolise someone is to utterly confuse them.
In Tudor English, a ‘gandermooner’ was a man who flirted with other women while his wife recovered from childbirth.
I have been so belrwdeied in the past but now it all makes sense!