English can be a difficult language to learn, even when it’s supposed to be your mother tongue. All those years in school reading the great classics aren’t a guarantee that we’ll come out the other side with perfect grammar. English will always have crazy exceptions, strange and even needless words.
Nevertheless, we still love it just like it is. At least most of the time! Here are some weird English facts that will make you love the language even more:
- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious isn’t actually the longest word in English. Yep. In fact, there is another incredibly long word in the dictionary: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, which is basically pneumonia caused by dust inhalation in a volcano explosion.
- There are ghost words that mean nothing. Oh yeah, another little gem. Some words appeared in the dictionary although they weren’t real words, because of simple printing errors. This was the case of the word “dord,” that appeared for eight years in the middle of the twentieth century.
- The language is growing: In fact, a new word is added to the dictionary every two hours. Over a year’s time, around 4000 words are added! So yes, you will never stop learning English.
Today we’re fostering knowledge and love for the English language, so we’re all about words. Do you confuse any of these 12 common words? It’s probably more frequent than you’d think!