Interesting Facts about English Part II

1. The dot over the letter "i" and the letter "j" is called a "superscript dot".
2. In normal usage, the # symbol has several names, for example: hash, pound sign, number sign.
3. In English, the @ symbol is usually called "the at sign" or "the at symbol".
4. If we place a comma before the word "and" at the end of a list, this is known as an "Oxford comma" or a "serial comma". For example: "I drink coffee, tea, and wine."
5. Some words exist only in plural form, for example: glasses (spectacles), binoculars, scissors, shears, tongs, gallows, trousers, jeans, pants, pyjamas (but note that clothing words often become singular when we use them as modifiers, as in "trouser pocket").
6. The shortest complete sentence in English is the following. "I am."
7. The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".
8. We pronounce the combination "ough" in 9 different ways, as in the following sentence which 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."
9. The longest English word without a true vowel (a, e, i, o or u) is "rhythm".
10. The only planet not named after a god is our own, Earth. The others are, in order from the Sun, Mercury, Venus, [Earth,] Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
11. There are only 4 English words in common use ending in "-dous": hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.
12. We can find 10 words in the 7-letter word "therein" without rearranging any of its letters: the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.
13. A sentence with a similar pattern, which may help to unravel the above, is:
    It is true, despite everything you say, that this word which this word refers to is not the same word which this word refers to.
    Or, if you insist on being really correct:
    It is true, despite everything you say, that this word to which this word refers is not the same word to which this word refers.
14. The "QWERTY keyboard" gains its name from the fact that its first 6 letter keys are Q, W, E, R, T and Y. On early typewriters the keys were arranged in such a way as to minimize the clashing of the mechanical rods that carried the letters.