Fascinating Facts about Language and Literature

• The English language dies every 14 days.
• The first novel ever written on a typewriter was Tom Sawyer.
• ‘I am.’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
• There are only four words in the English language which end in ‘dous’: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
• Ghosts appear only in 4 Shakespearean plays: Julius Caesar, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth.
• Microsoft founder Bill Gates bought ‘Codex Leicester’, one of Leonardo Di Vinci’s scientific journals for a whopping $30.8 million in November 1994.
• Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, tested chocolates for Cadbury’s while he was at school.
• Marcel Proust’s ‘Remembers of Things Past’ is the longest book in the world at 9,609,000 characters. The book is highly inspired by Proust’s personal experiences.
• Lewis Carroll’s book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was banned in China as the book suggests animals can talk and write just like humans, which according to the governor of Hunan, China is “disastrous”.
• ‘Stewardesses’ is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.
• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
• ‘SWIMS’ upside down still looks like ‘SWIMS’.
• The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” uses every letter in the alphabet.
• The town of Hamelin, Germany famous for the legend of the rat-catching Pied Piper has a Modern day Rat Problem due to the food left by tourists.
• John Milton used 8,000 different words in his poem ‘Paradise Lost.’.
• In the original story, Sleeping beauty was raped by the prince and gave birth to 2 children. She woke up when a kid sucked on her finger.

Test your knowledge with these intriguing facts about language, literature, and historical events related to famous writers and books.