Are you learning English with busuu and want to know really interesting facts about the English language?
The English language is weird, awesome and full of rules that lots of us don’t understand – that is what makes it different to any other language!
Did you know there are 24 different dialects of the English language in the US? Or that the Frisian dialects are the closest living languages to English, after Scottish?
Maybe you didn’t know that the word “nice” is actually derived from the Latin “nescius”, meaning ‘ignorant’!
“English is the greatest language in the world”: a bold claim! We do, however, mean “greatest” here in terms of the size of its vocabulary and its history and rules (we still think it’s pretty great though…)
Here’s another fun fact: many people believe that the word “testify” originated in Roman times, when men swore on their testicles. Unfortunately (for us, not the Romans) this is not true!
Due to a printing error, there was a word in the English dictionary without a meaning, which somehow managed to stay there from 1932 to 1940!. The word was ‘Dord’: it became known as ‘ghost word’.
Want to know more fun and interesting facts about the English language?
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