250 Fun Facts
250 Random Facts: Geography, Science, Language, Oceans & Culture
Language Facts
There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world today.
Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers, but English is the most widely spoken language when you include people who speak it as a second language.
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the English alphabet. A sentence like this is called a pangram.
The word "run" has hundreds of different meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary, more than almost any other English word.
"E" is the most commonly used letter in the English language.
"Dreamt" is the only common English word that ends in the letters "mt."
"Bookkeeper" is one of the very few English words with three double letters in a row.
"Strengths" is one of the longest English words with just one syllable.
"Rhythm" is the longest common English word without the vowels a, e, i, o or u.
Sanskrit and English are distant cousins
Sanskrit, English, Latin, Greek and Persian all belong to the same large Indo-European language family. That's why some basic words look surprisingly similar: Sanskrit "matr" and English "mother," or Sanskrit "pitr" and Latin "pater," meaning father.
Many everyday English words come from Indian languages, including shampoo, jungle, pyjamas, bungalow and cot.
The word "avatar," now used for profile pictures and video game characters, comes from Sanskrit and originally meant a god taking earthly form.
"Loot" comes from the Hindi word "lūt," meaning stolen goods.
The word "karma" came into English from Sanskrit, where it simply means "action."
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, which is also used for Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali.
In 2004, Tamil became the first language to be declared a classical language by the Government of India.
Tamil is one of the oldest living languages in the world, with literature that goes back more than 2,000 years.
One of the longest words in English dictionaries is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," a 45-letter lung disease caused by breathing fine dust.
"OK" is believed to have started in 1830s Boston as a joke abbreviation of "oll korrect," a deliberate misspelling of "all correct."
Louis Braille invented his reading system as a teenager
Louis Braille lost his sight in a childhood accident in France. At just 15 years old, he developed a system of raised dots that blind people could read with their fingertips. First published in 1829, braille is now used around the world in many languages.
"Hello" became a common greeting thanks to the telephone. Thomas Edison suggested it as the word to say when answering a call.
"Goodbye" is a shortened form of the old phrase "God be with ye."
Sign languages are complete languages with their own grammar, and they differ from country to country.
The small dot above the letters "i" and "j" is called a "tittle."
The "#" symbol is officially known as an "octothorpe."
The "&" symbol, called an ampersand, gets its name from children reciting "and per se and" at the end of the alphabet.
In Italian, the "@" symbol is nicknamed "chiocciola," which means "snail."
The "k" in "knight" used to be pronounced, centuries ago in Middle English.
The English alphabet once included extra letters, such as "thorn" (þ), which made a "th" sound.
Esperanto was invented to help the world communicate
In 1887, Polish eye doctor L. L. Zamenhof published Esperanto, a language designed to be easy to learn and to help people from different countries understand each other. It never became a world language, but today it still has thousands of speakers around the globe.
The word "muscle" comes from the Latin "musculus," meaning "little mouse," possibly because a flexing muscle looks like a mouse moving under the skin.
"Disaster" comes from Italian and old French words meaning "bad star," from the belief that the stars caused misfortune.
"Quarantine" comes from the Italian "quaranta giorni," meaning "forty days," the time ships had to wait before landing during plague outbreaks.
The word "nice" originally meant foolish or ignorant.
"Clue" comes from "clew," a ball of thread, like the one used in Greek myth to find the way out of a maze.
The word "alphabet" comes from "alpha" and "beta," the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.
Japanese uses three different writing systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji.
Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu are written from right to left.
There are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, but around 3,000 are enough to read a newspaper.
India celebrates Hindi Diwas on 14 September
On 14 September 1949, the Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, as the official language of the Union of India. Every year, the date is marked as Hindi Diwas, celebrating the language spoken by hundreds of millions of people.
After Hindi, Bengali is the most widely spoken language in India.
"Namaste" comes from Sanskrit and means "I bow to you."
Spanish uses an upside-down question mark (¿) at the start of questions.
German often joins words together to make very long compound words.
The Hawaiian alphabet has just 13 letters.
The Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea has one of the world's smallest alphabets, with only about 12 letters.
The Khmer alphabet of Cambodia is one of the largest, with around 74 letters.
Icelandic has changed so little over the centuries that Icelanders can still read sagas written nearly 1,000 years ago.
"Malayalam," the language of Kerala, is a palindrome. It reads the same forwards and backwards.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the world's most translated document
First adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into more than 500 languages and dialects. It sets out basic rights and freedoms that belong to every person, everywhere.
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