CURIOSITIES ABOUT ENGLISH LANGUAGE

• English is an official language in 53 countries
• Surprisingly, English is not an official language in the United Kingdom, United States or Australia (these countries don’t have any official language)
• Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language
• English today is the third largest language by number of native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish)
• Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to over a billion
• Non-native speakers outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1
• In December 2010 a joint Harvard/Google study found the language to contain 1,022,000 words and was expanding at the rate of 8,500 words per year.
• Of all the words in English language, the word “set” has the most definitions
• In English, the most commonly used letter of the alphabet is “E”
• And “Q” is the least used
• The letter used most frequently at the beginning of words is “S”
• The letter used most frequently at the end of words is also “S”