The word buffalo can be a place, an animal, or a verb, allowing a famously strange English sentence.
Recommend it?
Weird Facts
English has no rhyme for the word orange
Language
No single-word perfect rhyme exists in standard English — though poets have used "door hinge" and the Welsh hill "Blorenge" as near-rhymes.
Recommend it?
Weird Facts
Sign languages have their own grammar
Language
Natural sign languages are full languages with grammar, slang, poetry, and regional variation.
Recommend it?
Weird Facts
Click consonants are ordinary speech sounds in some languages
Language
Several southern African languages use click consonants as regular parts of words.
Recommend it?
Weird Facts
Cherokee has a syllabary invented by one person
Language
Sequoyah created a writing system for Cherokee that represents syllables rather than single consonants and vowels.
Recommend it?
Weird Facts
Semordnilaps become different words backward
Language
A semordnilap is a word that forms a different word in reverse, like stressed and desserts.
Recommend it?
Weird Facts
"The quick brown fox" sentence uses every letter
Language
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a pangram — it contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet and has been a typing-test staple since the late 1800s.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
The hashtag symbol is also called an octothorpe
Language
The # symbol picked up the odd name octothorpe in twentieth-century telephone culture.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Queue has four silent letters after q
Language
In English, queue is pronounced like the letter Q even though it has five letters.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Lipograms deliberately avoid a letter
Language
A lipogram is writing that omits a chosen letter, sometimes for an entire novel.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Sigur Rós sings in a made-up language sometimes
Music
Frontman Jónsi uses a wordless invented vocal style called Hopelandic on several tracks instead of Icelandic.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
The interrobang combines two moods
Language
The interrobang is a punctuation mark that merges a question mark and an exclamation point.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Muscle comes from little mouse
Language
The Latin root of muscle refers to a little mouse, probably from the look of a flexing muscle.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Nice once meant foolish
Language
The English word nice shifted meanings many times before becoming a compliment.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
The word alphabet comes from alpha and beta
Language
Alphabet combines the names of the first two Greek letters.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
The word "sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia" means brain freeze
Language
It refers to the referred pain from rapid cooling of the sphenopalatine ganglion behind the nose — the official medical term for that ice-cream headache.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged among children
Language
A new sign language developed as deaf children in Nicaragua began communicating together at school.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Emoji does not come from emotion
Language
Emoji comes from Japanese words meaning picture character, not from the English word emotion.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Awful once meant full of awe
Language
Awful originally meant awe-inspiring before its meaning drifted toward very bad.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Goodbye grew from God be with ye
Language
The farewell goodbye evolved from an older blessing phrase.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Hangul was deliberately designed
Language
The Korean alphabet Hangul was created in the fifteenth century with systematic letter shapes.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Whistled languages can carry across valleys
Language
Languages such as Silbo Gomero encode speech in whistles that travel long distances.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Serendipity was coined from a fairy tale
Language
The word serendipity was inspired by The Three Princes of Serendip and their accidental discoveries.
Recommend it?
Weird FactsNo ratings yet
Palindromes read the same backward
Language
Words such as level and civic are palindromes because their letters mirror front to back.
Recommend it?
0%
Loading…
—
0 loved it
·0 neutral
·0 passed
Loved it
0
🌱No upvotes from this audience yet.
Neutral
0
•No neutral ratings from this audience yet.
Not for them
0
✨Nobody from this audience downvoted yet.
Send feedback
Help shape Weird. Bug, idea, or general note — we read everything.