“I Am” Is The Shortest Complete Sentence In The English Language

On March 4, we let our inner nerd out for National Grammar Day! The day was established in 2008 by Martha Brockenbrough, the founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. The day’s motto is: “It’s not only a date, it’s an imperative: March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!”

We take that imperative seriously, so this National Grammar Day, we celebrate the idiosyncrasies of the English language by studying common grammar mistakes, proofreading our correspondence, and thanking our editors!

• 5th Century BC – A form of grammar is used in Sanskrit, but traditional grammar and the alphabetic system is developed much later by the early Greeks
• 1st Century BC – Dionysius Thrax defines grammar as a mode that allows a person to speak a language and its components about each other.
• 1755 – The first English dictionary was written in 1755.
• 1950s – Grammar undergoes a dramatic change after new theories are introduced, primarily by Noam Chomsky.
• 2008 – Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, establishes National Grammar Day.
• 2009 – Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider created the platform Grammarly.
• According to the Global Language Monitor, the estimated number of words in the English language is 1,025,109.  There is some controversy over that figure, but it’s safe to say it is over a million.
• “I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
• A pangram sentence contains every letter in the language.
• There are “ghost-words.” Believe it or not, there are some words that appear in the dictionary because of printing errors. The nonexistent word “dord” appeared in the dictionary for eight years in the mid-20th century. It became known as a “ghost word.”
• A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours.
• The word “girl” was not initially used to refer to a specific gender. It used to mean “child” or “young person” regardless of gender.
• English actually originates from what is now called northwest Germany and the Netherlands.
• The phrase “long time no see” is believed to be a literal translation of a Native American or Chinese phrase as it is not grammatically correct.
• “Go!” is the shortest grammatically correct sentence in English.
• The most common adjective used in English is ‘good’.
• The most commonly used noun is ‘time’.
• Month, orange, silver, and purple do not rhyme with any other word.
• Over 80% of the information stored on computers worldwide is in English.
• Words that are used to fill in time when speaking, such as ‘like’ or ‘basically’, are called crutch words (and should best be avoided!)
• 90% of English text consists of just 1000 words.
• There are 24 different dialects of English in the US.
• There are seven ways to spell the sound ‘ee’ in English. This sentence contains all of them: ‘He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas’.
• The oldest English word that is still in use is ‘town’.
• An ambigram is a word that looks the same from various orientations. For example, the word “swims” will be the same even when turned upside down.
• The first number spelled out that contains an “a” is one thousand.
• If you wrote out all the numbers (e.g. one, two, three . . . ), you would not use the letter “b” until the word “billion.”
• The longest word in the English language is 45 letters long: “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.” It is the scientific name for a type of lung disease
• Most average adult English speakers know between 20,000–35,000 words.
• Shakespeare added 1,700 words to the English language during his lifetime.
• The most complex word in the English language is “set.” This small word has over 430 definitions and requires a 60,000-word definition that covers 24 pages in the Oxford English Dictionary.
• The longest common word with all the letters in alphabetical order is “almost.”
• The longest common word with no vowels is “rhythms.”
• China has more English speakers than the United States.
• The word “whatever” consistently ranks as the most annoying English word.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Grammarly

Fact Retriever

National Today