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Infographic: Interesting Facts about the English Language

Did you know that the letter “e” is the most commonly used letter used in the English language, accounting for around one in eight uses (and yes, that is why the Wheel of Fortune uses it in the final puzzle of the show)?

And did you know that it is the second (and not the first) most-spoken language in the world, with some 2 billion native and foreign speakers?

You can find those facts, and others, in the following infographic.

P.S. And to occupy your Friday, here are three videos on the history and crazier aspects of a language that doesn’t just borrow from other languages, it knock over the head and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.

Interesting-facts-about-the-English-language-infographic

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Comments


poiboy December 11, 2015 um 4:53 pm

english is ranked 1st though in mutli-national usage. whereas chinese has a higher usage for obvious reasons of native speaker populations.


Gary December 11, 2015 um 5:27 pm

The frequency of the letter E is what led the design of morse code to assign a single "dot" to that letter. It made sense to make the most common letter the quickest to send. This is something I learned as a kid in the Cub Scouts: many, many, many years ago now! I can still rhyme off the sequence of "pure" letters, based on their frequency: E T I M S O H

E dot
T dash
I dot dot
M dash dash
S dot dot dot
O dash dash dash
H dot dot dot dot

After that you start using combinations of dots and dashes. I never really managed to learn any other morse letters – at least not so I could remember them for more than about 60 seconds – but, curiously, that sequence has stuck with me all my days. 🙂


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