23rd April each year is observed as English Language Day. This day is the official birth and death day of one of the greatest English writers to have graced the Earth – William Shakespeare.
Who was William Shakespeare?
Born on 23rd April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare is widely considered as one of the best writers of all time. In his lifetime, he wrote over thirty-five plays in four categories – history, comedy, tragedy, and romance.
Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing are only a few of his prominent works.
Despite being one of the most renowned and popular writers of all time, surprisingly not much is known about Shakespeare’s personal life.
English Langauge Day
The World English Language Day came into being as a result of an initiative by the United Nations Department of Public Information, which established a day to celebrate each of the six official languages of the United Nations – English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish.
The objective of this day is to bring about an awareness about the English language and a respect for the culture and history of the language.
The first World English Language Day was observed on 23 April 2010.
Importance of English language
English is so commonly spoken around the world that it is very often called the ‘world language’ or the ‘lingua franca’ of the world – a language that is spoken by two speakers whose native languages are not common.
On this Day, Let’s Have a Look at Some Interesting and Fun Facts about this Language.
- English is NOT the most commonly spoken language in the world. It occupies the third position, after Chinese and Spanish.
- There is something special about the sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
Do you know what it is? This sentence is a pangram sentence, which means it contains all the alphabets of a language. - The shortest and most commonly used word in the English language is ‘I.’
- Did you know that a new word is added to the English language every two hours! And around 4,000 new words are added each year to the dictionary.
- The longest word in English has a whopping 45 alphabets and it is ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’. And what does this mean? It is a kind of a disease of the lungs caused by the inhaling of sand dust and ash. Wasn’t that a new one?
- English is the official language of the skies! All pilots, irrespective of their nationality and ethnicity, use English on international flights.
- Which word in the English dictionary do you think has the highest number of definitions? It’s the word ‘set.’ And would you believe that it has a whopping 464 meanings!
- The only word in English where 80% of the alphabets are useless is ‘Queue.’
- More English words start with the letter ‘s’ than with any other letter.
- A word that is made by combining parts of multiple words is called a ‘portmanteau.’ For instance, smog is a combination of ‘smoke’ and ‘fog,’ and brunch is a combination of ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch.’
What other trivia about this language are we missing? Let us know in the comments section below!
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