7 Fun facts about the English language 1. Hundreds of new words are added to the English language every year. “There is a group that tracks this and counts how many words there are in the English language: The Global Language Monitor. Currently, they claim there are 1,005,366 words in the language, after June 10, 2009 having announced the 1,000,000th word. This means that 5,366 words have been added to the language in the past approximately 10 years, or about 536 words per year. That’s approximately two words per day…,” according to Quora. This fluctuates significantly; in fact, over 535 words were added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2020 alone. 2. “E” is everywhere! The most common letter in English is “e”. According to Readers Digest, “In an analysis of all 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, OED editors found that the letter E appears in approximately 11% of all words in the common English vocabulary, about 6,000 more words than the runner-up letter, A. 3. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet. As such, it’s often used to test typewriters and keyboards. 4. Some English words exist only in plural form. Can you name any? Glasses (spectacles) Binoculars Scissors Shears Tongs Jeans Pants Pajamas Weird, right? There are plenty more! 5. The combination “ough” can be pronounced in 10 different ways Oh, English. Just when we’re starting to feel good about you, your strange pronunciation techniques strike again! 6. If you wrote out all the numbers (i.e. one, two, three…), you would not use the letter “b” until the word “billion.” You can also spell every number up to “1000” without using the letter “a.” 7. More people in the world have learned English as a second language than there are native English speakers. Cool