School children recited it at the end of the alphabet as “and per se and”, which became “ampersand”.
Wacky Facts
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The word “robot” comes from Czech — and “avatar” from Sanskrit.
“Avatar” comes from the Sanskrit avatāra, meaning descent, used for a deity taking earthly form. The internet borrowed it for profile pictures.
The shortest complete English sentence is “I am.”
Imperatives like “Go.” are even shorter, with an implied subject.
“Pundit” comes from Sanskrit.
From “paṇḍita”, meaning a learned person; in English it now means an expert commentator.
English uses many words borrowed from Hindi and Sanskrit.
Jungle, pyjamas, loot, thug, shampoo, cot and avatar all entered English from Indian languages.
The most common letter in English is E.
E makes up about 12–13% of letters in English text; Q and Z are the rarest.
“Set” has one of the longest dictionary entries in English.
The Oxford English Dictionary has recorded hundreds of senses for “set”; “run” has since overtaken it in some counts.
Mandarin has the most native speakers; English has the most learners.
Hindi is also among the top four most spoken languages when second-language speakers are counted.
“Nice” used to mean foolish.
From Latin nescius, “ignorant”, the word meant silly or simple in Middle English, and only gradually shifted to meaning pleasant.
“Bungalow” comes from Bengali.
The word comes from “bangla”, meaning “in the Bengal style”, a type of single-storey house.
Thiruvalluvar’s Thirukkural has 1,330 couplets.
The Tamil classic on ethics, wealth and love is one of the most translated works from India.
India has 22 officially recognised languages.
The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution lists 22 languages; hundreds more are spoken across the country.
1839“OK” started as a joke abbreviation.
In 1839 a Boston newspaper used “O.K.” for “oll korrect”, a jokey misspelling of “all correct”. It spread through an 1840 election campaign.
Tamil is one of the oldest living languages.
Tamil inscriptions go back over 2,000 years, and it was declared a classical language of India in 2004.
“Emoji” is Japanese, not related to “emotion”.
It comes from e (picture) + moji (character). The resemblance to “emotion” is a coincidence.
Sanskrit has words for “zero” that also mean “sky”.
“Shunya” means empty or void; ancient Indian texts also used words like “kha” (sky) for zero.
“Goodbye” started as “God be with ye”.
The phrase was shortened over centuries, influenced by greetings like “good day”.
Sanskrit grammar was described in detail about 2,500 years ago.
Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, a set of nearly 4,000 rules, is one of the oldest and most precise grammars ever written.
The longest English word in major dictionaries has 45 letters.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was coined in the 1930s specifically to be a long word; it refers to a lung disease.
“Avatar” is a Sanskrit word.
It means “descent”, originally the incarnation of a deity on Earth.
“Loot” came into English from Hindi.
It comes from the Hindi “lūṭ”, from Sanskrit, and entered English in the 18th century.
A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is the best-known English pangram, long used to test typewriters and fonts.