- DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleicAcid.
- Cooties are a kind of lice. Kids are right, you really don't want to catch cooties.
- Q is the only letter that does not appear in the names of any state of the Unites States.
- The side of a hammer is a cheek.
- Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, is the only state capital name that shares no letters with the name of its state.
- Hoful is an unusual word meaning cautious.
- A panagram is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. For example: Pack my red box with five dozen quality jugs.
- Monday is the only day of the week that has an anagram, dynamo.
- The study of insects is called entomology.
- The white part of your fingernail is called the lunula.
- The word "karate" means "empty hand."
- If you have had a haircut, you can be called an acersecomic.
- The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.
- "Fickleheaded" and "fiddledeedee" are the longest words consisting only of letters in the first half of the alphabet.
- The Caesar family has two months named after them. July was named for Julius Caesar and August for Augustus Caesar.
- The idiom "pillar of salt" means to have a stroke, or to become paralyzed and dead.
- The world's largest alphabet is Cambodian, with 74 letters.
- The average American knows about one-tenth of a million words.
- "Adcomsubordcomphibspac" is the longest acronym. It is a Navy term standing for Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command.
- The last thing to happen is the ultimate. The next-to-last is the penultimate, and the second-to-last is the antepenultimate.
- If you look at a monkey wrench, you think it is obvious where it got its name, but you are wrong. It was named after its inventor, Charles Moncke.
- A radio announcer speaks about 180 words per minute.
- "Rhythms" is the longest English word without vowels.
- If you write a letter to the New York Times, chances are one in twenty-two that it will be published.
- The world's most widely spoken language is the Mandarin dialect of Chinese, with 500 million speakers.
- Camel's-hair brushes were named after Mr. Camel.
- "Forty" is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. "One" is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.
- A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.
- The technical term for snapping your fingers is "fillip."
- ZIP stands for "Zoning Improvement Plan".
- No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
- A "clue" meant a ball of thread at first.
- "Dreamt" is the only common English word ending in -MT. Others are the obscure "adreamt," "redreamt," "undreamt," or "daydreamt."
- "Kemo Sabe" means "soggy shrub" in Navajo.
- Of all the words in the English language, the word "set" has the most definitions.
- The word robot was invented in 1920, in an early science fiction play.
- Freelance originally meant mercenary soldier, a person who was free to use his lance for you, if you had money to pay him.
- "Second string," meaning "replacement or backup," comes from the middle ages. An archer always carried a second string in case the one on his bow broke.
- A "Blue Moon" is the second full moon in a calendar month (it is rarely blue).
- The "O" when used as a prefix in Irish surnames means "descendant of."
- If all numbers are arranged in alphabetical order, "eight" would be the first number. "Zero" would be the last number.
- The letter B evolved from tthe Egyptian symbol for house.
- A ghost writer pens an anonymous book.
- Ballistics is the science that deals with the motion of projectiles.
- In a typical office, each worker uses 2.5 pounds of paper per day.
- "One thousand" contains the letter A, but none of the words from one to nine hundred ninety-nine has an A.
- A professional typist's fingers move 12 miles in one workday.
- The study of word origins is called etymology.
- SWIMS is the longest word with 180-degree rotational symmetry (if you were to view it upside-down it would still be the same word and perfectly readable).
- The word "hypocrite" comes from Greek, in which it means "actor".
- The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
- Cannibalism, eating human flesh, is also called anthropophagy.
- Hydroxyzine (a prescription drug) is the longest containing "x-y-z" in exact order. Next in line line is xyzzors, a scientific name for a nematode worm in biology.
- All except 15 percent of international phone calls are conducted in English.
- The three-syllable word "hideous," with the change of a single consonant, becomes a two-syllable word with no vowel sounds in common: "hideout."
- The shortest "-ology" (study of) word is oology, the study of eggs.
- The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
- Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the longest word consisting entirely of alternating vowels and consonants.
- A new high-tech term is "degrade gracefully" which is the opposite of a computer crash.
- "Tautonyms" are scientific names for which the genus and species are the same.
- The ridges on the sides of coins are called reeding or milling.
- The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."
- A palindrome is a sentence that if read backward says the same thing. The following may be the stupidest palindrome on earth: "Straw? No, too stupid a fad, I put soot on warts."
- The longest word in the Oxford dictionary is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis." It has 45 letters.
- This thing is not a slash: /. It is called a solidus or an obolus.
- The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."
- In German, "eins" and "acht" are the only numbers with their letters in alphabetical order.
- A camera was originally called "camera obscura."
- The word "earthling" was first found in print in 1593.
- The explative, "Holy Toledo," refers to Toledo, Spain, which became an outstanding Christian cultural center in 1085.
- The word "paper" came from the papyrus plant from which paper was made. Papyrus used to be a common plant in Egypt, but no longer grows there.
- The only countries in the world with one syllable in their names are Chad, France, Greece, and Spain.
- The term "throw one's hat in the ring" comes from boxing, where throwing a hat into the ring once signified a challenge. Today it nearly always signifies political candidacy.
- The word "bible" came from the Greek word "biblion" which means book.
- "Four" is the only number whose number of letters in the name equals the number.
- The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.
- The word "pen" came from the Latin "penna" which means wing, or feather.
- "Asthma" and "isthmi" are the only six-letter words that begin and end with a vowel and have no other vowels between.
- To the ancient Romans, the left side of the human body was thought of as evil and the right side was good. The Latin word for left is "sinister."
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