99 Fun Facts About Grammar

Traditional grammar divides English words into how many parts of speech?

Traditional school grammar counts eight parts of speech, among them noun, verb, adjective and preposition; modern grammars add determiners and divide the classes differently.

Which part of speech expresses emotion, as in 'oops'?

'Oops' is an interjection, a word that expresses sudden emotion and stands outside the grammar of the sentence, often followed by an exclamation mark.

Roughly how many irregular verbs does English have?

English has only about 100 to 200 irregular verbs, but among them are its commonest verbs, such as be, have and say; regular verbs simply add -ed for past tense and participle.

'Went' was originally the past tense of which verb before it was borrowed by 'go'?

'Went' was originally the past tense of 'wend', meaning to make one's way; 'go' adopted it by the 1500s, a process grammarians call suppletion.

'The cake was eaten by the dog' is in which grammatical voice?

'The cake was eaten by the dog' is in the passive voice: the subject receives the action, and the verb combines a form of 'be' with a past participle.

Which mood does the verb 'were' show in 'If I were the teacher'?

'If I were' uses the subjunctive, the mood for hypothetical or wished-for situations; fixed phrases such as 'God save the King' and 'be that as it may' preserve it.

Which English modal verbs make up the core set?

The nine core modals are can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would; ought to, had better, dare and need count as marginal modals because each behaves only partly like a modal.

The serial comma takes its nickname from which publishing house, whose printer Horace Hart prescribed it?

The 'Oxford comma' is named for Oxford University Press, where printer Horace Hart's 'Rules for Compositors and Readers', first printed in 1893, made the serial comma house style.

A missing serial comma won Maine dairy drivers an overtime settlement of how much?

Oakhurst Dairy drivers won a $5 million settlement in 2018 after the First Circuit ruled in 2017 that 'packing for shipment or distribution', lacking a serial comma, was ambiguous.

The Star Trek phrase 'to boldly go' is the classic example of what?

'To boldly go' is a split infinitive, an adverb wedged between 'to' and its verb; Henry Alford's 1864 'A Plea for the Queen's English' helped make it taboo, though Fowler defended it.

The quip 'This is the sort of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put' mocks which supposed rule?

The quip mocks the rule 'never end a sentence with a preposition'; it is apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill, but its earliest known printing, in 1942, names no author.

Which poet's 1672 complaint about a Ben Jonson phrase made preposition-stranding a grammatical sin?

John Dryden's 1672 'Defence of the Epilogue' faulted a Ben Jonson line for ending in a preposition; Joshua Poole had grumbled earlier, but Dryden made objecting fashionable.

The word apostrophe comes from Greek meaning what?

Apostrophe comes from apostrophos, 'turning away or elision', a mark for a dropped letter; Geoffroy Tory brought it into French printing in 1529 for forms such as l'heure.

What is the superfluous mark in market signs like 'apple's 50p' commonly called?

'Apple's 50p' shows the greengrocers' apostrophe, a stray apostrophe in a plural; the name, from fruit-stall price signs, was popularised by Lynne Truss's 2003 bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001, and what happened to it?

The society's founder was retired journalist John Richards; it closed in 2019 when he declared that ignorance and laziness had won, 18 years after his campaign earned a 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature.

The semicolon first appears in a 1496 book by Pietro Bembo, printed by which Venetian printer?

Aldus Manutius printed Bembo's De Aetna in 1496 with the first semicolon; his press also introduced italic type in 1501 and the pocket-sized octavo book.

What is Project Semicolon?

Project Semicolon, founded by Amy Bleuel in 2013, is an anti-suicide initiative and tattoo: a semicolon marks where an author could have ended a sentence but chose to continue, often inked on the wrist.

The interrobang, combining a question mark and an exclamation point, was proposed in 1962 by whom?

Advertising executive Martin Speckter proposed the interrobang in 1962 in the magazine TYPEtalks, wanting one mark for a question asked in surprise or disbelief; Remington typewriters offered a key for it in 1968.

What is the upside-down interrobang called?

The inverted interrobang is the gnaborretni, 'interrobang' spelled backwards; it opens sentences in languages that use inverted question and exclamation marks, and Unicode gives it its own code point.

The name ampersand comes from schoolchildren slurring which phrase?

Reciting the alphabet, children ended with 'and per se and', meaning '& by itself is and', and the phrase slurred into ampersand, a word recorded by 1837.

The ampersand was long taught to children as what?

Schoolchildren once recited the ampersand as the 27th letter of the alphabet, chanting it after Z; the symbol itself began as a ligature of the letters e and t in the word 'et'.

The palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw Elba' was implausibly attributed to whom?

The line was implausibly attributed to Napoleon, exiled on Elba in 1814; it was actually coined by a certain 'J.T.R.' in 1848, a century before 'A man, a plan, a canal – Panama'.

According to Guinness, what is the world's longest palindromic term in everyday use?

Guinness lists the 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias, a soapstone dealer, as the longest palindrome in everyday use; the longest in English, tattarrattat, comes from Joyce's Ulysses.

Which musician's song 'Bob' is composed entirely of palindromes?

'Bob', from 'Weird Al' Yankovic's 2003 album Poodle Hat, parodies Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' with palindromic lines such as 'Do geese see God?'

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known example of what?

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is a pangram, a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet, which is why typewriter tests and font samples use it.

Which 32-letter pangram, with only six duplicated vowels, is often cited as among the most efficient?

'Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs' covers the alphabet in 32 letters, its only repeats being six vowels; a perfect pangram uses each letter exactly once, which in English requires obscure words.

A word like 'dust', which can mean both to remove dust and to add it, is called what?

'Dust' is a contronym, a word with two opposite meanings; 'sanction' (permit or penalise) and 'cleave' (split or cling) are classic examples.

Why is a word with two opposite meanings also called a Janus word?

A Janus word is named after the Roman god usually shown with two faces, looking both ways like its two meanings; 'fast' can mean fixed in place or moving quickly.

Which pronoun did Merriam-Webster name Word of the Year in 2019?

The American Dialect Society had chosen singular they in 2015 and named it Word of the Decade for the 2010s.

The Chicago Manual of Style cited singular they's 'venerable use' by which of these writers?

The 1993 edition's list of authors with a venerable use of singular they included Austen and Shakespeare, alongside Addison, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin and Scott.

A grammatical sentence made of eight repetitions of one word uses the name of which city?

It uses buffalo as a proper noun, a common noun for bison, and a verb meaning to bully; Dmitri Borgmann popularised it in 1967.

'The horse raced past the barn fell' is a famous example of what?

'The horse raced past the barn fell' is a garden-path sentence: readers take 'raced' as the main verb and must reanalyse it as a reduced relative; psycholinguist Thomas Bever coined the example in 1970.

What animal features in the joke behind the title of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves?

The joke stars a panda that eats, shoots and leaves after reading a badly punctuated wildlife guide; Truss's 2003 book became a New York Times bestseller.

Who wrote the first edition of The Elements of Style, in 1918?

William Strunk Jr., a Cornell professor, privately printed The Elements of Style in 1918; his former student E. B. White revised it in 1959, and Time later ranked the 'little book' among the century's most influential.

Which linguist's 2009 essay '50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice' attacked Strunk and White?

Geoffrey Pullum's 2009 essay '50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice' showed that several of Strunk and White's own 'passive' examples were not passives at all; he also rejected their ban on 'which' in restrictive clauses.

What is joining two independent clauses with only a punctuation mark, as in 'I came, I saw', called?

Joining two independent clauses with only a comma is a comma splice; a fused sentence joins them with no punctuation at all, and Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jolley used splices deliberately.

'Turning the corner, a handsome school building appeared' illustrates which error?

The sentence has a dangling modifier: 'turning the corner' should describe the subject, yet the building ends up doing the turning; Strunk and White made opening participle phrases refer to the grammatical subject a rule.

The word portmanteau, for a blend like 'brunch' or 'smog', was first used in this sense in which book?

In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that 'slithy' packs 'lithe' and 'slimy' into one word 'like a portmanteau', a two-part suitcase, giving the term its linguistic sense.

Which African country chose a portmanteau name in 1964 when two territories merged?

Tanganyika and Zanzibar became Tanzania; Oxbridge and Brexit are English cousins.

Which bird's name escaped the Great Vowel Shift because it imitates the bird's call?

Cuckoo kept its Middle English /kuːkuː/ sound through the Great Vowel Shift because it echoes the bird's call; ordinary words with the same vowel, such as 'house', shifted to a diphthong.

In 'She gave him the book', which grammatical role does 'him' play?

'Him' is the indirect object, the recipient of the giving; 'the book' is the direct object, and the sentence can be recast as 'She gave the book to him'.

Which grammarian first tentatively suggested the fewer/less distinction, in 1770?

Robert Baker floated the idea in his 1770 Reflections on the English Language, finding 'no fewer than a hundred' more elegant than 'no less'; later grammarians hardened his preference into a rule.

In 2008, British supermarket Tesco replaced its '10 or less' express-checkout signs with what wording?

Tesco's 2008 signs read 'Up to 10 items', a phrasing suggested by the Plain English Campaign that sidestepped the fewer-versus-less argument entirely.

What is the Sator Square?

The Sator Square is a Latin palindrome readable four ways, across and down in either direction; 'Sator arepo tenet opera rotas' has been found scratched on walls from Pompeii to Britain.

Which ancient Greek scholar's Art of Grammar is the oldest surviving Western grammar handbook?

Dionysius Thrax's Art of Grammar, from about 100 BC, stayed the standard schoolbook for grammar into the twelfth century AD, and the Romans modelled their own handbooks on it.

The ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini is famous for which foundational Sanskrit text?

Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī describes Sanskrit in nearly 4,000 rules called sūtras; Leonard Bloomfield called it one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence.

Which language's academy recommended an opening inverted question mark in 1754?

Spanish adopted the opening ¿ after the Real Academia Española recommended it in the 1754 second edition of its Ortografía; use became general only during the nineteenth century.

The exclamation mark most likely evolved from which Latin word of joy?

One common account derives the mark from io, a word of joy written at sentence ends with the I stacked above a shrinking O until the modern mark emerged.

How did users of older typewriters without an exclamation key produce the mark?

Typists struck a period, backspace, then an apostrophe to build the mark, since many typewriters had no exclamation key until the 1970s; printers called it a screamer, gasper, slammer or startler.

Which operating system popularised 'bang' as the programmers' name for the exclamation mark?

Unix spread 'bang' through its UUCP 'bang paths' and the '#!' shebang; the nickname was already used in 1950s American typesetting manuals, and some programmers call the mark 'shriek'.

Who wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar, the influential 1762 textbook?

Robert Lowth, later Bishop of London, culled his examples of 'false syntax' from Shakespeare, Milton, Swift and the King James Bible.

To whom did H. W. Fowler dedicate his 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage?

Fowler dedicated the book to his late brother Francis, who had co-written The King's English with him in 1906 and died of tuberculosis in 1918 after serving in the First World War.

The paragraph mark ¶ grew out of a letter C standing for which Latin word?

Capitulum means 'little head'; medieval scribes drew the mark in red ink to flag a new train of thought before paragraph breaks existed.

Workers at which company coined 'octothorpe' for the # key by 1968?

Bell Labs engineers needed names for the # and * keys being added to the touch-tone telephone keypad; 'octothorpe' first reached a US patent in 1973.

Which US magazine is famous for spelling 'coöperate' with two dots over the second o?

The New Yorker's house style marks 'coöperate' with a diaeresis to show the vowels belong to separate syllables, a practice most publications dropped for a hyphen or nothing at all.

In which language does the question mark look exactly like an English semicolon?

Unicode gives the Greek mark its own code point but normalises it to the ordinary semicolon, so the two are identical in practice.

'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' appeared in which 1957 book by Noam Chomsky?

Syntactic Structures (1957) used it to show a sentence can be perfectly grammatical yet meaningless, unlike its reversed twin 'Furiously sleep ideas green colorless'.

The term 'eggcorn', for a misheard phrase like 'old-timers' disease', comes from mishearing what?

The name was suggested on the Language Log blog in 2003 after a woman was found writing 'egg corn' for acorn, the oak's nut.

Sylvia Wright coined 'mondegreen' in 1954 after mishearing a line from what kind of source?

She misheard 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen' in 'The Bonny Earl of Murray', a Scottish ballad her mother read to her; Merriam-Webster added the word in 2008.

Swapping the first sounds of words, as in 'blushing crow', is named after which kind of slip?

Swapping initial sounds is a spoonerism, named for the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford, who was reportedly prone to it; 'runny babbit' is another classic.

Confusing similar-sounding words, as in 'the very pineapple of politeness', is called what?

'Pineapple' for 'pinnacle' is a malapropism, named for Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's 1775 comedy The Rivals; Shakespeare's Constable Dogberry made the same mistakes, so it is also called a Dogberryism.

Inserting a word inside another, as in 'abso-bloody-lutely', is called what?

'Abso-bloody-lutely' shows tmesis, cutting one word open to insert another; in English the insert is usually an expletive, and the Roman poet Ennius famously split 'cerebrum' around a verb.

Saying 'octopi' is a hypercorrection that wrongly treats 'octopus' as a word from which language?

'Octopi' treats octopus as a Latin second-declension noun, but the word descends from oktōpous, so the pedant's plural would be octopodes; plain octopuses is the safest choice.

The name of the schwa, the unstressed 'uh' vowel, comes from which language?

Schwa comes from the Hebrew shva, a vowel-point for a very short or absent vowel, and reached English via German; the IPA symbol ə is simply a rotated lowercase e.

The International Phonetic Association was founded in 1886 by teachers led by which linguist?

Paul Passy led the group of French and English language teachers who formed the association in Paris in 1886; it only adopted the name International Phonetic Association in 1897.

In Esperanto, every noun ends with which letter?

Every Esperanto noun ends in -o; adjectives end in -a and present-tense verbs in -as, so a word's part of speech shows at a glance, and plurals add -j.

The 'Ye' in 'Ye Olde Shoppe' comes from printers substituting y for which lost English letter?

Early type sets lacked thorn (þ), so printers set y for it and 'ye' was always pronounced 'the'; the 1611 King James Bible used the abbreviation in places.

French « » quotation marks take their name from a printer with which first name?

Guillemets are a diminutive of Guillaume: the printer Guillaume Le Bé gets the credit, though the marks first appeared in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.

Henry Denham's reversed ⸮ mark of the 1580s was meant to end what kind of sentence?

Denham's reversed mark, now called the percontation point, was meant to close a rhetorical question; it never caught on, though Unicode encodes it as U+2E2E.

A text that deliberately avoids a letter, like the E-less 1939 novel Gadsby, is called what?

Gadsby is a lipogram, a text written without a chosen letter; Ernest Vincent Wright could not use any number between six and thirty, since all of their names contain an e.

'Dord', the ghost word that slipped into Webster's 1934 dictionary, was defined as what?

A slip reading 'D or d, cont./density' was meant to list D as an abbreviation, but was typeset as a word.

Spaces between written words first appeared in 7th- and 8th-century Bibles from where?

Irish monks, for whom the scriptural language was foreign, introduced word spacing, so the earliest spaced Bibles come from Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England; classical texts had been written as scriptio continua, one unbroken stream of letters.

In linguistics, an asterisk before a sentence signals that it is what?

A starred sentence is ungrammatical by native-speaker judgement; the convention began in historical linguistics, where the asterisk marks reconstructed forms nobody ever saw written down, then spread to ill-formed sentences.

The dagger † and the division sign ÷ both descend from the obelus, Greek for what?

An obelos was a sharpened spit or roasting skewer; ancient editors drew the mark beside lines judged spurious, as if skewering the dubious text.

Which punctuation mark takes its name from the Greek for 'leave out'?

The ellipsis takes its name from élleipsis, 'omission' or 'leaving out'; the Chicago Manual of Style wants each of its three periods separated by a non-breaking space.

In English ablaut reduplication, the first element almost always takes which vowel sound?

The first element takes the i of 'hit', as in tick-tock, zig-zag and ding-dong; the pattern even governs three-part runs like tic-tac-toe and bish-bash-bosh.

In English's usual adjective order ('nice little old round house'), which type comes first?

Opinion comes first in the usual order (opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose); native speakers follow it without being taught, which is why 'old little house' sounds wrong.

An em dash is so named because its width matches what?

An em equals the font's point size, so a 12-point font has a 12-point em dash; typesetters also call it a mutton dash, and the half-width en dash a nut dash.

Using two negatives to make a weakened positive, as in 'not unhappy', is called what?

'Not unhappy' is litotes, an understatement that affirms by negating its opposite; in many dialects a second negative instead intensifies, as in Chaucer's 'He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde'.

Which word's softened entry in Webster's Third (1961) drew particular scorn from critics?

The entry for ain't, no longer labelled 'illiterate' as in the previous edition, drew the loudest scorn; the Globe and Mail warned the change would 'comfort the ignorant'.

Animal-group names like 'a pride of lions' are traditionally called terms of what?

Venery means hunting; the 1486 Book of Saint Albans lists 164 such terms, including jokes like 'a doctrine of doctors'.

'Children' was formed by adding -en to which earlier plural of 'child'?

The Middle English plural childer took a second plural ending, -en, making children a double plural; 'brethren' and 'oxen' are the other -en survivors in everyday use.

About 45% of the world's languages, including Latin and Persian, use which basic word order?

Subject–object–verb is the commonest order, about 45% in Tomlin's 1986 survey; English's subject–verb–object pattern is a close second at roughly 42%, and object-first orders are vanishingly rare.

Which basic word order did Marc Okrand give Klingon?

Klingon uses object–verb–subject, the exact reverse of English's order; Marc Okrand chose typologically rare features on purpose so the language would sound alien, and his 1985 Klingon Dictionary laid it out.

Sonja Lang's minimalist language Toki Pona is built from roughly how many words?

Toki Pona has about 120 words: the 2014 book Toki Pona: The Language of Good presents that core, and a later dictionary lists 137 'essential' words.

Who wrote the first printed grammar of English, the 1586 Bref Grammar for English?

William Bullokar modelled his Bref Grammar for English on William Lily's school grammar and also campaigned, in his 1580 Booke at Large, for a reformed phonetic spelling.

Which Roman grammarian, author of the medieval staple Ars minor, taught St Jerome?

Aelius Donatus, Jerome's teacher in fourth-century Rome, wrote the Ars minor, the standard elementary grammar of the Middle Ages; 'donat' became a Middle English word for any primer.

Perec's E-less 1969 novel La Disparition appeared in English under what title?

Gilbert Adair's 1994 translation, A Void, kept the constraint and uses no letter e; Perec then wrote Les Revenentes using no vowel except e.

The nonsense phrase 'etaoin shrdlu' comes from the keyboard of which machine?

On a Linotype, the first two columns of keys read etaoin and shrdlu; operators ran a finger down them to fill out a botched line, and the slug sometimes made it into print.

'Irregardless' is thought to blend 'regardless' with which word?

Merriam-Webster derives irregardless from a blend of irrespective and regardless; the OED's first citation is from western Indiana in 1912, though the word appeared in a South Carolina newspaper in 1795.

The earliest recorded use of 'literally' as a mere intensifier dates to which year?

The Oxford English Dictionary's first intensifier citation is from 1769, when Frances Brooke wrote that a man was 'literally to feed among the lilies'; Ambrose Bierce's 1909 blacklist of literary faults already condemned the habit.

Which style guide dropped its ban on 'hopefully' meaning 'it is hoped' in 2012?

The AP Stylebook accepted 'hopefully' for 'it is hoped' in April 2012, to loud protest from traditionalists; Merriam-Webster dates the sentence-adverb use to 1932.

'Muphry's law' holds that anything written criticising editing will contain what?

Muphry's law says any criticism of editing or proofreading will carry a fault of its own; John Bangsund of Australia's Society of Editors set it out in 1992, misspelling Murphy on purpose.

The 'Cupertino effect' is named after old spell checkers mangling which word?

Early spell checkers knew only the hyphenated 'co-operation', so 'cooperation' became 'Cupertino', which is how official documents came to mention 'Regional Cupertino'.

'Snowclone', for a fill-in-the-blank cliché, was coined in 2004 by a professor of what?

Glen Whitman, an economics professor at California State University, Northridge, answered a Language Log appeal for a name in 2004; the word nods to the old chestnut about Inuit words for snow.

What is the smallest meaningful unit of language, such as the -s in 'cats'?

The -s in 'cats' is a morpheme, the smallest meaningful unit; those that can stand alone, like 'cat', are free, while affixes like plural -s are bound to a root.

The modern comma descends from which medieval mark used to show a pause?

The comma descends from the virgula suspensiva, a diagonal slash used from the 13th to the 17th century; the word comma itself comes from komma, 'a piece cut off'.

The punctuation term colon comes from a Greek word meaning what?

Kōlon meant a limb or member of the body; in rhetoric it was a section of a complete thought, and Aristophanes of Byzantium supposedly marked its end with a middot.

The word hyphen comes from a Greek phrase meaning what?

Hyphen comes from hyph' hen, 'under one' or 'together'; the original sign was a small tie drawn beneath two letters to show the letters belonged to one word, before word spacing existed.