There are very, very few words in the English language where vowels aren’t used. And ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language. There are 22 ‘e’s in the previous two sentences alone! Then, imagine how much difficult it must have been to write Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel without the letter ‘e’! Except…
It was on this day, in the year 1877, that the American daily, The Washington Post, was first published. It is the oldest existing newspaper in the area, and is the most widely circulated newspaper published in Washington, D.C. Needless to say, The Washington Post is one of the leading dailies in the United States of America. The newspaper…
‘Go’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. It is an imperative sentence that is basically used as a command or order. However, there is an ongoing debate whether ‘I am’ should be given the honor. Basic grammar teaches us that a complete sentence should have a subject, a predicate, and an active…
Abstemious means ‘sparse use’ or ‘moderate intake of food and drink’; facetious means being ‘flippant’. Apart from their interesting meanings, the words have a unique connection between them. Both these words have all the vowels in alphabetical order. Such words are quite rare and form a very short list. Abstentious is another such word. The…
The island country Maldives, one of the most geographically dispersed countries, is a chain of twenty-six atolls spread around 90,000 sq km. The word ‘atoll’ – an island, or a group of islands, formed of coral – is a word that has its roots in the Maldivian language Dhivehi. The word ‘atoll’ derives from the Dhivehi word atholhu. Much to the delight…
The name dinosaur is derived from two Greek words: deinos meaning ‘fearfully great’ and sauros meaning ‘lizard’. It was coined by the English anatomist Richard Owen in 1842. Owen recognized that the huge fossilized bones unearthed at several places in nineteenth-century England were markedly different from the bones of the other existing reptiles.
