Thursday 3 January 2008

Words

The name for Oz in the “Wizard of Oz” was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence “Oz.”

The combination “ough” can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence 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.”

The word “Checkmate” in chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,” which means “the king is dead”.

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.”

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is “screeched.”

“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.

The symbol on the “pound” key (#) is called an octothorpe.

The dot over the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle.

There are only four words in the English language which end in”-dous” tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

The longest word in the English language, according to the xford English Dictionary,
is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

The word “set” has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

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