Weirdest Things About The English Language
- Melyssa Wilson
- May 26, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: May 28, 2022
As a native English speaker, I always thought our language was just fine and easy to learn. However, as I got older, I started realizing that our language is kind of weird and has a lot of crazy rules. Here's my list of five weird rules and five weird facts about the English language.
5 Weird Rules
Words that look exactly the same, but sound different and have different meanings
Examples:
Tear (as in crying)
vs
Tear (as in ripping something)
-
Wind (as in movement of air)
Vs
Wind (as in the state of being wound)
-
Wound (As in an injury)
Vs
Wound (Past tense of "wind". See above)
2. Words that look like they should rhyme, but don't
Examples:
Rough vs Cough vs Though
-
Amber vs Chamber
-
Dead vs Bead
3. Words that aren't pronounced like they look
Examples:
Queue (kyoo)
-
Colonel (kur-nuhl)
-
Melee (ay-lay)
4. The "I before E except after C" rule isn't really true
Examples:
Freight
-
Neighbor
-
Ancient
5. A list of adjectives won't make sense or sound right unless they're in a certain order
Opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose
Examples:
The big bad wolf
Vs
The bad big wolf
-
The nice little old lady
Vs
The old nice little lady
-
The nice little old plump white dog
Vs
The old white plump little nice dog
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5 Weird Facts
The word "girl" used to be gender neutral
It simply meant "child" or "young person"
2. The popular rule for using "A" and "An" is actually wrong
The rule states that you should use "a" before words that start with a consonant, and "an" before words that start with a vowel. That's actually not quite right.
The real rule is to use "a" before words with a consonant sound, and "an" before words that start with a vowel sound. Example:
I just need an hour more before I run my errands.
3. Why some words are spelled the same but pronounced differently
The reason is because of alternating stress patterns. A word will have a different meaning depending on which syllable (first or second) is stressed.
Examples:
Record (Noun. "This is going on record")
Vs
Record (Verb. "I will record this song")
-
Content (Noun. "The contents of this folder will show you the truth.")
Vs
Content (Verb. "I am content with how things are.")
4. A new English is created approximately every 98 minutes
That's 14.7 words a day and over 4,000 words per year.
3 words created in the last year:
Quarenteen (A teenager during the COVID-19 pandemic)
Awe Walk (Taking a walk outside and making an effort to look at the things around you)
Doomscrolling (Reading the news on social media and expecting it to be bad – so much so that you become obsessed with looking at updates)
5. A word or phrase spelled the same backwards and forwards is called a palindrome
Examples:
Racecar
-
Taco cat
-
Madam
-
Nurses run
-
Tattarrattat
(coined by James Joyce in his 1922 Ulysses to imitate the sound of a knock on the door. )
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I hope you enjoyed this list as much as I did. 😄
Some of my sources:
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