Posted by Sundi Hayes in I came across an article over the weekend that left me amazed at how little we (the general public) know about English! I’m not perfect but I do try and common mistakes are few and far between here. The article I found this weekend clued me into why it is so difficult!
There are OVER 615,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary! This whopping number doesn’t even include technical or scientific terms. The English language has over 200,000 words in common use!
Isn’t that incredible – in fact, with all the options available, incredible seems like a very weak choice! How about – implausible, inconceivable, preposterous, outlandish or unthinkable?
Thanks to a thesaurus I came up with those. Did you know English is the only language to have a thesaurus?
Have you ever asked a friend who is bilingual how to say a specific word from English in their other language? How long do they really have to think about it? Is there ever anything that is a perfect fit?
Several of my friends have said, “Well, there isn’t anything exactly like that.” Gee, you think maybe that is because we have SO many words that catch the smallest nuances of emotion or variation within English?
Compared to German which has 184,000 common words and French which has just 100,000!?
Go back to that Oxford English Dictionary, shall we?
- It is compiled in 20 volumes which contain 21,730 pages and weights 137 lbs.
- It contains 59 million words and 350 million characters
- It includes 2,436,500 quotations in which the Bible is the most quoted work.
You know what amazes me the most? When you start throwing all those words togther…think about how many combinations there are! I’m just talking about the words and how many there are! No wonder it takes real effort on the part of someone trying to learn English to figure out the infinite number of uses for all those words and word combinations!
(And Twitter thinks I only need 140 characters! Give me a break!)
Nibbling away -
Sundi
