1.

First off, the Oxford English Corpus currently

contains over 2 billion words.
shutterstock.com

OH MY GOD SO MANY.

2. The average person, though, is likely to know only

about 50,000 of them.
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com

3. That might be because the ten most common

lemmas (base forms of a word) in English make up25%
of all words used.
BuzzFeed

Those lemmas are the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I.
Seriously, just try to write a paragraph that doesnt contain any form of those words.

4. Words have lifespans that can range from fewer than

1,000 years up to 20,000 years.
BuzzFeed

A word like throw is expected to have a lifespan of about 1,000 years, while words like I
and who are likely to reach the 20,000 year mark.

5. It is estimated that a new word is created every 98

minutes.
thejonasblog.tumblr.com

So maybe plobnrg will be an actual word by the time youve finished reading this.

6. You is the 18th most common word in English, while

me only clocks in at number 50.
lovethispic.com

I guess English speakers are just really selfless people. Or something.

7. There are over 50 countries around the world that use

English as an official language, including Ghana,
Pakistan, and the Philippines.
Miramax Films / Via rebloggy.com

Thats around 1/4 of all countries in the world.

8. The dot above a lowercase i or j is called a tittle.

en.wikipedia.org

AKA the greatest word in the English language.*

*this claim is technically unsubstantiated, but come on.

9. The longest word in English with all its letters in

alphabetical order is aegilops.
en.wikipedia.org

Aegilops is a genus of plants in the grass family Poaceae. The more you know.

10. According to researchers at Reading University,

the oldest known word in English is who, dating back
more than 20,000 years.
BBC / Via giphy.com

Followed by two, three, and I.

11. The longest one syllable word is the ten-letter

scraunched, found in a 1620 translation of Don
Quixote.
americanilliterati.blogspot.com

Screeched, scratched, and a few more nine-letter words are tied for the title among more
commonly used terms.

12. The longest word containing no repeating letters,

including every vowel, is uncopyrightable, at 15 letters.
unrealfacts.com

If you dont require the word to have one of every vowel, dermatoglyphics, meaning the
study of skin markings, is also 15 letters long.

13. Although most people believe the word orange to have

no perfect rhyme, it actually does - sporange.
NBC / uproxx.com
NBC / uproxx.com

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.
funnyjunk.com

There are two terms if you count its negative, undreamt.

15. There are nine words in English that contain two us in

a row.
hypenotice.com

The best of which, natch, is muumuu.

16. In 1934, Websters released a dictionary accidentally

containing a made-up word - dord - that wasnt
caught until 1939.
merriam-webster.com

And it actually remained in Websters dictionaries until 1947. Sogood work fixing that
mistake, guys.

17. Author Ernest Vincent Wright once wrote an entire

novel - just over 50,000 words - without using the letter
e. AT ALL.
en.wikipedia.org

I cant even write one sentence without the letter e.

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.