According to a 2009 study by researchers at Reading University, the oldest words in the English language include “I“, “we“, “who“, “two” and “three“, all of which date back tens of thousands of years.
There was no first word. At various times in the 5th century, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other northern Europeans show up in what is now England. They're speaking various North Sea Germanic dialects that might or might not have been mutually understandable.
Mother, bark and spit are some of the oldest known words, say researchers. Continue reading → Mother, bark and spit are just three of 23 words that researchers believe date back 15,000 years, making them the oldest known words.
Bill Bryson asserts in his book Mother Tongue that "hello" comes from Old English hál béo þu ("Hale be thou", or "whole be thou", meaning a wish for good health; cf. "goodbye" which is a contraction of "God be with ye").
The longest English word
The longest word in English has 189,819 letters and takes 3 hours to pronounce. This is a technical term for the chemical composition of titin. Titin is the largest known protein responsible for maintaining the passive elasticity of the muscles.
The shortest word is 'a. ' Some might wonder about the word 'I' since it consists of one letter, too. In sound, 'a' is shorter because it is a monophthong (consists of one vowel), while 'I' is a diphthong.
100th (hundredth) 101st (hundred and first)
The word 'love' was once '*leubh', a word used by the Proto-Indo-Europeans approximately five thousand years ago to describe care and desire. When 'love' was incorporated into Old English as 'lufu', it had turned into both a noun to describe, 'deep affection' and its offspring verb, 'to be very fond of'.
Etymology. The word water comes from Old English wæter, from Proto-Germanic *watar (source also of Old Saxon watar, Old Frisian wetir, Dutch water, Old High German wazzar, German Wasser, vatn, Gothic ???? (wato), from Proto-Indo-European *wod-or, suffixed form of root *wed- ("water"; "wet").
A more likely explanation is that the term originated as an abbreviation of orl korrekt , a jokey misspelling of 'all correct' which was current in the US in the 1830s. The oldest written references result from its use as a slogan by the Democratic party during the American Presidential election of 1840.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands.
Supposedly, the word “English” is a corruption of the word “Anglish” — or, the “Language of the Angles”, one of the Germanic tribes that, along with the Saxons and the Jutes (collectively the “Anglo-Saxons”), invaded and colonised Britain from the 5th century after the Romans left.
EUNOIA is the shortest word in English which has all five vowels.
Shh, psst, and hmm do not have vowels, either vowel symbols or vowel sounds. There is some controversy whether they are in fact “words,” however.
The longest word in the English language, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, won primary school speller Jemimah Elise Sampson, the East Coast Radio's Last Kid Standing title, as seen in the video below published by the East Coast Radio.
Some of the most popular words of this length include THROUGH, PICTURE, and COUNTRY. If you play word games through your workday, you may discover an upset employer.
The first known use of the word “goodbye” was recorded in 1573 in a letter by English writer and scholar, Gabriel Harvey, which reads: “To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howdyes.”" “Godbwye” is a contraction of the phrase “God be with ye.” Throughout the years the word “good” was ...