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Korean was designed as a writing system in the 15th century by King Sejong the Great specifically to promote literacy among common people.
The letter 'E' is the most commonly used letter in the English language and appears in about 11% of all words.
The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island speak a language completely unknown to the outside world.
The word 'salary' comes from the Latin word 'salarium,' which referred to money given to Roman soldiers to buy salt.
The most translated document in the world is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, available in over 500 languages.
The Oxford comma debate — whether to use a comma before 'and' in a list — has led to actual lawsuits over ambiguous language.
Tonal languages like Mandarin and Vietnamese use pitch to distinguish word meaning — the same syllable can have different meanings depending on tone.
The word 'avocado' comes from the Aztec word 'ahuacatl,' which also means a certain male body part.
Basque, spoken in parts of Spain and France, is a language isolate with no known relation to any other language on Earth.
The word 'gymnasium' comes from the Greek word 'gymnos,' meaning naked, because ancient Greeks exercised without clothes.
There are more English speakers in China than in the United States.
The shortest sentence in the English language that contains every letter of the alphabet is 'Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.'
Tamil is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world, with a literary history spanning over 2,000 years.
The word 'emoji' comes from Japanese — 'e' means picture and 'moji' means character.
There is a language called Silbo Gomero, spoken on the Canary Islands, that consists entirely of whistling.
Languages die at a rate of about one every two weeks, and by 2100, nearly half of all current languages may be extinct.
The word 'strengths' is the longest word in the English language with only one vowel.
English has borrowed words from over 350 other languages.
The word 'trivia' comes from the Latin word for 'three roads,' referring to information found at crossroads.
Whistled languages, used in mountainous regions, can carry messages over distances of up to 5 miles.
The word 'goodbye' is a contraction of the phrase 'God be with ye.'
There are at least 50 different words for snow in the Inuit languages.
The shortest complete sentence using every letter of the alphabet is 'The five boxing wizards jump quickly.'
About a new word is added to the English language every two hours, roughly 4,000 new words per year.
The word 'bookkeeper' is the only unhyphenated English word with three consecutive double letters.
Onomatopoeia — words that imitate sounds — vary between languages. In English, dogs say 'woof,' in Japanese 'wan,' and in Korean 'meong.'
The Pirah language, spoken by an Amazonian tribe, has no words for specific numbers or colors.
The longest word without a repeating letter is 'uncopyrightable.'
Japanese has three writing systems — hiragana, katakana, and kanji — often used together in the same sentence.
The word 'queue' is the only English word in which removing the last four letters does not change its pronunciation.
There are over 200 artificial languages that have been created, but Esperanto is the most widely spoken.
The word 'nerd' was first coined by Dr. Seuss in the book 'If I Ran the Zoo' in 1950.
The most common letter in the English language is 'E,' appearing in about 11% of all words.
Agglutinative languages like Turkish and Finnish can express entire sentences as a single word by stacking suffixes together.
The word 'set' has the most definitions of any word in the English language, with over 430 listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The word 'lethologica' describes the state of being unable to remember the word you want to use.
In Morse code, the most common letter in English — 'E' — is represented by a single dot.
The exclamation mark was originally called the 'note of admiration.'
The average person knows between 20,000 and 35,000 words in their native language.
Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed language, with an estimated 2 million speakers worldwide.
The word 'robot' comes from the Czech word 'robota,' meaning forced labor.
The Khmer script, used for the Cambodian language, has the largest alphabet in the world with 74 letters.
Babies can distinguish between all phonetic sounds from all languages until about 10 months of age, after which they specialize in their native language.
The longest word in the dictionary is 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,' a type of lung disease.
Sign languages have their own grammar and syntax that differ entirely from spoken languages.
The word 'OK' is believed to be the most universally recognized word in the world.
There is no word in the English language that rhymes with 'orange,' 'silver,' 'purple,' or 'month.'
The word 'typewriter' is one of the longest words you can type using only the top row of a QWERTY keyboard.
Papua New Guinea has the most languages of any country — over 840 living languages.
The word 'dreamt' is the only English word that ends in 'mt.'