1. First off, the Oxford English Corpus currently contains over 2 billion words.
2. The average person, though, is likely to know only about 50,000 of them.
3. That might be because the ten most common lemmas (base forms of a word) in English make up 25% of all words used.
4. Words have lifespans that can range from fewer than 1,000 years up to 20,000 years.
5. It is estimated that a new word is created every 98 minutes.
6. "You" is the 18th most common word in English, while "me" only clocks in at number 50.
7. There are over 50 countries around the world that use English as an official language, including Ghana, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
8. The dot above a lowercase "i" or "j" is called a "tittle."
9. The longest word in English with all its letters in alphabetical order is "aegilops."
10. According to researchers at Reading University, the oldest known word in English is "who," dating back more than 20,000 years.
11. The longest one syllable word is the ten-letter "scraunched," found in a 1620 translation of Don Quixote.
12. The longest word containing no repeating letters, including every vowel, is "uncopyrightable," at 15 letters.
13. Although most people believe the word "orange" to have no perfect rhyme, it actually does - "sporange."
An extremely rare term, "sporange" is a botanical term referring to part of a fern.
14. The only English term ending in -mt is "dreamt," a spelling of "dreamed" commonly used in British English.
15. There are nine words in English that contain two "u"s in a row.
16. In 1934, Webster's released a dictionary accidentally containing a made-up word - "dord" - that wasn't caught until 1939.
17. Author Ernest Vincent Wright once wrote an entire novel - just over 50,000 words - without using the letter "e." AT ALL.
And perhaps most importantly:
18. Lexicographer Paul Dickson entered the Guinness Book of World Records by collecting 2,964 synonyms for the word "drunk," the most synonyms collected for any one term.
