50 Things You Didn’t Know About The English Language

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21A moment is a very brief period of time, or a specific moment in time. However, in mediaeval Europe, a moment was precisely 1/40th of an hour, or 90 seconds.

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22A zoilist is an unfair or unnecessarily harsh critic, or someone who particularly enjoys finding fault in things. Red Symons and Simon Cowell are examples of zoilists.

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23The longest English word with its letters in reverse alphabetical order is the compound word ‘spoonfeed’.

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24‘Bookkeeper’ and ‘bookkeeping’ are the only two unhyphenated words in the English language with three consecutive double letters. Other such words, like ‘sweet-toothed’, require a hyphen to be readily readable.

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25The word ‘testify’ was derived from a time when men were required to swear on their testicles. The practice appears in the bible’s Old Testament.

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26The part of your back that you can’t quite reach to scratch is called the acnestis. It’s derived from the Greek word for ‘cheese-grater.’

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27Although an ounce is commonly known as a unit of weight, it is also a duration of seven and a half seconds.

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28‘Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia’ is the proper name for an ice-cream headache. The term ‘ice-cream headache’ has been in use since at least January 1937. The first published use of the term ‘brain freeze’, as it pertains to cold-induced headaches, was in May 1991.

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29Phonology is a branch of linguistics that deals with systems of sounds in a language. It is not to be confused with the similar sounding ‘phenology’, which is the study of seasonal natural phenomena.

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30‘Typewriter’ is one of the longest common words you can type on the top row of a typewriter. Some others include ‘repertoire’, ‘proprietor’ and ‘perpetuity’.

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