Word facts

Word facts: all 12, explained

1. The word "set" has one of the most meanings in English.

   The Oxford English Dictionary has given "set" hundreds of senses. In its newest edition the verb "run" has overtaken it, with around 645 meanings.

   Source: Set (word) (Wikipedia) · Fact card

2. A word that never existed sat in a major dictionary for years.

   "Dord" appeared in Webster’s New International Dictionary from 1934 as a word meaning density. It came from a slip that read "D or d", an abbreviation for density, and was removed in 1947.

   Source: Dord (Wikipedia) · Fact card

3. "OK" started as a joke abbreviation.

   In 1830s Boston, newspapers had a fad for comic misspelled abbreviations. "OK" stood for "oll korrect", a misspelling of "all correct", and spread widely after an 1840 US presidential campaign.

   Source: OK (Wikipedia) · Fact card

4. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.

   A sentence that uses every letter is called a pangram. This one has been used since the late 1800s to test typewriters and later to show off fonts.

   Source: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (Wikipedia) · Fact card

5. The Hawaiian alphabet has only 13 letters.

   The Hawaiian alphabet has five vowels, seven consonants and the ʻokina, a glottal stop. That is one of the smallest alphabets in the world.

   Source: Hawaiian language (Wikipedia) · Fact card

6. The word "emoji" has nothing to do with "emotion".

   Emoji comes from Japanese: "e" means picture and "moji" means character. The resemblance to "emotion" is a coincidence.

   Source: Emoji (Wikipedia) · Fact card

7. A group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.

   Flamingos live in large, noisy colonies, and "flamboyance" is one of the more colorful collective nouns for them. Groups can number in the thousands.

   Source: Flamingo (Wikipedia) · Fact card

8. The word "robot" comes from a 1920 Czech play.

   Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. introduced the word, from the Czech "robota", meaning forced labor. His brother Josef suggested it.

   Source: Robot (Wikipedia) · Fact card

9. "Quarantine" comes from the Italian for "forty days".

   During plague outbreaks in the 1300s and 1400s, ships arriving in Venice had to wait offshore for 40 days, "quaranta giorni", before passengers could land.

   Source: Quarantine (Wikipedia) · Fact card

10. The word "nice" used to mean foolish.

    It comes from the Latin "nescius", meaning ignorant. Over centuries its meaning shifted through shy, fussy and precise before settling on pleasant.

    Source: Semantic change (Wikipedia) · Fact card

11. The word "ketchup" probably comes from a Chinese fish sauce.

    Most etymologists trace it to a Hokkien Chinese word for a fermented fish sauce. Early English ketchups were made from mushrooms, walnuts or oysters, not tomatoes.

    Source: Ketchup (Wikipedia) · Fact card

12. Avocado, chocolate and tomato are all words from the Aztec language.

    They come from the Nahuatl words ahuacatl, chocolatl (or a related form) and tomatl, which reached English through Spanish.

    Source: Nahuatl (Wikipedia) · Fact card