WOWS !

1. The word ‘karate’ means ‘empty hand.’
2. Skiing is the only word with double i.
3. The shortest word in the English language with all its letters in alphabetical order is the word ‘almost’
4. The naval rank of ‘Admiral’ is derived from the Arabic phrase ‘amir al bahr’, which means ‘lord of the sea’.
5. Only three words have entered English from Czech: polka, pilsner, and robot.
6. There are at least two words in the English language that use all of the vowels, in the correct order, and end in the letter Y: abstemiously & facetiously.
7. Papaphobia is the fear of Popes.
8. In Chinese, the words crisis and opportunity are the same.
9. The 7 deadly sins are: Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust.
10. The word boycott comes from Charles C. Boycott. He was hired by an Irish earl to collect high rents from tenant farmers who completely ignored him.
11. There are only 4 words in the English language which end in ‘duos’: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
12. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
13. Polish’ is the only word in the English language which when capitalized change from being a verb to becoming a nationality.
14. The oldest words in the English language are around 14,000 years old, originating in a pre-Indo-European language group called Nostratic (‘our language’) by experts. Words from this language group that survive in modern English include apple (apal), bad (bad), gold (gol), and tin (tin).
15. In English, the days of the week are named after the Saxon gods (except for Saturday, which is named after the Roman god of agriculture). Sunday is named after the sun, Monday after the moon, Tuesday after Tiw, Wednesday after Woden, Thursday after Thor, Friday after Frige, and Saturday after Saturn.
16. Of all the words in the English language, the word ‘set’ has the most definitions.
17. Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize that *this* was the day of the changeover.
18. Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian seal for that reason.
19. There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, ‘therein’: the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.
20. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable contains one of the longest sentences in the French language 823 words without a period.
21. Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means ‘the capital’ in the Korean language.
22. The verb ‘cleave’ is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
23. The first words spoken by Thomas Edison over the phonograph were: ‘Mary had a little lamb.’
24. The first words spoken by over Alexander Bell over the telephone were: ‘Watson, please come here. I want you.’
25. There are thirteen languages spoken by more than 100 million people. They are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French, Japanese, German, and Urdu.
26. The term ‘honeymoon’ is derived from the Babylonians who declared mead, a honey-flavored wine, the official wedding drink, stipulating that the bride’s parents be required to keep the groom supplied with the drink for the month following the wedding.
27. Before Columbus arrived in the Americas, no native american had type B blood.
28. There are only two sequences of four consecutive letters that can be found in the English language: ‘rstu’ and ‘mnop.’ Examples of each are understudy and gymnophobia.
29. French was the official language of England for over 600 years.
30. QANTAS, the name of the Australian national airline, is a (former) acronym, for Queensland And Northern Territories Air Service.
31. The word ‘pixel’ is a contraction of either ‘picture cell’ or ‘picture element.’
32. The words ‘angry’ and ‘hungry’ are the only two that end in ‘gry’.
33. The correct response to the Irish greeting, ‘Top of the morning to you,’ is ‘and the rest of the day to yourself.’
34. The first use of the word ‘robot’ to describe advanced humanlike machines was in 1920, in R.U.R., an early science fiction play. It comes from the Czech word robota, meaning ‘compulsory labour’.
35. More than 1,000 different languages are spoken on the continent of Africa.
36. You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm is going off by going on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all.
37. The ZIP in Zip-code stands for ‘Zoning Improvement Plan.’
38. The word ‘testify’ derived from a time when men were required to swear on their testicles.
39. ‘Speak of the Devil’ is short for ‘Speak of the Devil and he shall come’. It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That’s why when you’re talking about someone and they show up people say ‘Speak of the Devil’.
40. Quicksand works slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
41. The word ‘queue’ is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.
42. The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
43. Before Jets, Jet lag was called Boat lag.
44. In the English language, there are only three words that have a letter that repeats six times. Degenerescence (six e’s), Indivisibility (six i’s), and nonannouncement (six n’s).
45. The word denim comes from ‘deNimes’, or from Nimes, a place in France.
46. The word ‘assassination’ was invented by Shakespeare.
47. Widow is the only female form in the English language that is shorter than its corresponding male term (widower).
48. The distress code ‘Mayday’ comes from the French for help me, M’Aide!
49. There was no punctuation until the 15th century.
50. There are many varieties of English around the world, including American English, Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian English, South African English, Indian English, Caribbean English and Filipino English.
51. Out of all the eight letter words in the English language, only one has only one vowel in it: ‘strength’.
52. Floccinaucinihilipilification, the declaration of an item being useless, is the longest non-medical term in the English language.
53.  ‘Go.’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
54. ‘W’ is the only letter in the alphabet that does not have one syllable. It has three!
55. There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most widely spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are 885,000,000 people in China that speak that language.
56. The word Tips is actually an acronym standing for ‘To Insure Prompt Service’.