Fun language quirks

English is not normal: 10 incredible eccentricities of our language

Did you know English is one of the few languages where the first-person singular pronoun "I" is always capitalized? Or that it contains words that can mean two completely opposite things? Even something as simple as the days of the week reveals a difference: in many other languages, they are always written in lowercase. English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to explain. In fact, some of its strangest features might surprise even native speakers. From unusual grammar rules to words with surprising pasts, English is filled with quirks that make it unlike any other language. Here are 10 fascinating things that make English unique.

If you’ve ever talked with someone learning English, you’ve probably heard the same question: How can words like "cough," "dough," and "through" all be spelled almost the same but sound completely different? It’s a fair question, and one that even native speakers sometimes struggle to answer.

English is unusual because the same group of letters can be pronounced in several completely different ways. Few spellings illustrate that better than the ending "-ough." Depending on the word, it can be pronounced nine different ways. Linguists even have a famous mnemonic to demonstrate the chaos: "A rough-coated (uff), dough-faced (oh), thoughtful (aw) ploughman (ow) strode through (oo) the streets of Scarborough (uh); after falling into a lough (ock), he coughed (off) and hiccoughed (up)." No wonder English spelling has a reputation for keeping learners on their toes.

Fortunately, there is an explanation for those discrepancies between pronunciation and spelling in English.

Unlike Spanish or Italian, where words are usually spelled the way they sound, English is full of surprises. Through, threw, and thorough all sound different despite looking similar, while words like knife, debt, and receipt contain silent letters. That’s because English borrowed vocabulary from many different languages, and when the printing press helped standardize spelling in the late 1400s, pronunciation was still changing. The Great Vowel Shift (which occurred primarily between the 15th and 17th centuries) transformed the way many words were spoken, but their spellings largely stayed the same. The result is a language where spelling often has to be memorized rather than guessed, making spelling bees a uniquely English challenge.

You may have noticed people using "they" to refer to a single person and assumed it was a modern invention. Surprisingly, it’s anything but new.

The singular "they" has been part of English for more than 600 years. It appears as early as the 14th century in William and the Werewolf, an anonymous Middle English poem from around 1350, and was later used naturally by some of the greatest writers in the language, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. In fact, Austen used the singular "they" dozens of times in Pride and Prejudice (1813), writing lines such as, "I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly." The controversy came much later. During the 18th and 19th centuries, grammarians who wanted English to follow the rules of Latin argued that writers should use the generic "he" instead. But everyday speakers never completely abandoned the singular "they," which is why it has survived for centuries and remains part of modern English today.

Many English words have more than one meaning. But two words stand in a league of their own, with so many definitions that they hold a record in the dictionary.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "set" has one of the longest entries, spanning more than 20 pages and containing over 430 distinct senses. Depending on the context, it can be a verb (to set a book on a table), a noun (a chess set or a television set), or an adjective (the plans are set). And as if that weren’t enough, another everyday word is giving it competition. Recent linguistic research suggests that "run" may now have more than 640 distinct meanings and uses, making it one of the most versatile words in the English language. No wonder even native speakers sometimes have to rely on context to figure out exactly what someone means.

Have you ever noticed that some English words seem to contradict themselves? A single word can sometimes mean two opposite things, depending on the context.

Take "dust," which can mean either to remove dust or to sprinkle something with dust. "Cleave" can mean to hold together or to split apart. "Overlook" can mean to watch over something or to fail to notice it. And "sanction" can mean both to approve an action and to impose a penalty for it. These unusual words are called contronyms, terms that have two opposing meanings that somehow coexist in the same word. While other languages have them too, such as the French hôte ("host" or "guest") and the German aufheben ("to preserve" or "to abolish"), English is especially rich in these linguistic contradictions.

What if we told you that English has no future? It sounds a bit dramatic, but from a grammar viewpoint, it’s actually true.

Unlike languages such as Spanish or French, English has no separate future verb tense. Instead of changing the verb itself, English builds the future with helper words like "will," "shall," or "going to." In other words, English verbs only change with the present and past tenses. We say "walk," "walking," and "walked," but for the future we simply add a helper: "will walk." Many other languages work differently. In Spanish, for example, the verb itself changes in all three time frames: camino (I walk), caminé (I walked), and caminaré (I will walk).

Every time you write about yourself, you follow one of English’s most unusual rules: the first-person singular pronoun "I" is always capitalized.

It feels completely natural to us, but it is surprisingly rare among the world’s major languages. Spanish uses yo, French uses je, Italian says io, Portuguese uses eu, and Dutch says ik, all written in lowercase (unless, of course, they start a sentence). English stands out as the only major language that always gives its first-person pronoun a capital letter, and the reason is more practical than symbolic. In medieval handwritten texts, the single letter "i" was easy to miss among surrounding words. To make it easier to read, scribes gradually began writing it larger, and by the late 15th century, the capital "I" had become the standard form we still use today.

"Sit down," "give up," "look into," "take off," "make up," and "run out of" are expressions English speakers use every day naturally. But for people learning the language, it can feel like a never-ending challenge.

That’s because phrasal verbs rarely follow a predictable pattern. The same verb can take on dozens of completely different meanings just by adding a small word like up, out, on, or off. Other languages have similar constructions. German, for example, has separable verbs such as ankommen ("to arrive"), which literally combines an ("at") and kommen ("to come"). In a sentence, the particle separates and moves to the end: Ich komme morgen an ("I arrive tomorrow"). But while many languages use verb-particle combinations, English stands out for having hundreds of phrasal verbs, making them one of the defining features of everyday conversation and one of the biggest troubles for learners.

If you’ve ever written in another language, you’ve probably noticed something that feels almost wrong at first: the words for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday lose their capital letters.

In most of the world’s major languages, the days of the week are written like ordinary nouns, with lowercase letters unless they begin a sentence. But English is one of the very few exceptions. We capitalize all seven days every time we write them, and this is surprisingly rare worldwide. In standard German, the days are capitalized too, but only because all nouns are. In English, however, the days are classified as proper nouns (like Tom or New York) rather than common nouns (like house or pencil). That grammatical distinction is why they always begin with a capital letter.

Believe it or not, some of the most common words in English are complete mysteries. We use them every day, but no one knows where they came from.

Most English words can be traced back through older languages, but a handful have no clear ancestry at all. Historical linguists consider them native English words with unknown origins because they have no identifiable roots and no obvious relatives. One example is the word "dog": for centuries, the common Germanic word for a canine was "hound." Then, sometime in the late Old English period, "dog" suddenly appeared and eventually replaced it. "Boy" first showed up in the 13th century as boie, originally meaning a servant, rogue, or rascal, but its origin remains a mystery. The same is true for "bad," which appeared in Middle English in the late 1200s and gradually displaced older words such as "evil," despite having no known linguistic roots.

SURPRISE HAPPENS

Did You Know These 10 Epic Underdog Wins?

Image: Daniel Damasio

No victory tastes better than an elusive one. Be it in the realm of sports, everyday life, work, or anywhere else, the achievement that took effort is more appreciated than the one that comes easy.

The team that is expected to lose a competition is called the underdog. For several possible reasons, the odds are stacked against this participant and not much is expected from them. This is why an underdog victory, in true David and Goliath style (ideally not deadly, though), is always surprising and often welcomed. Below are ten examples of this peculiar situation. Did you know about them?

Image: Thomas Park

In the 2007 Super Bowl, the Patriots were a clear favorite: undefeated with a 16-0 record during the regular season and numerous offensive scoring records. The Giants came into the playoffs with a 10-6 record, as a wild card team.

Until the fourth quarter, the two teams only scored a combined 10 points. But that was when things changed unexpectedly. A series of unbelievable plays by the Patriots ended with the winning touchdown by Plaxico Burress that gave the Giants a 17-14 victory. The Giants won the Super Bowl and kept the Patriots from having a truly undefeated season.

Image: Wesley Tingey

If you ever wondered what 5000-1 odds look like, you can go back to the unbelievable victory achieved by Leicester City in the 2014-2015 Premier League championship.

The modest club that had been lucky to remain in that very league during the previous season, took advantage of down years for the big teams like Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, and Arsenal to become the most unlikely champions in English football.

Image: Moises Alex

Winning a Wimbledon Championship at 17 years old? Check! That is if you are Boris Becker. In the build-up to the 1985 Wimbledon Championships, the 17-year-old German focused his preparations at Queens Club. When he won the warm-up event, commentators declared him a ‘future Wimbledon champion’ – little did they know they’d be proven right three weeks later in the tennis tournament of the summer.

As the tournament progressed and both John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors succumbed to the big-serving South African Kevin Curren, the improbable started to look increasingly likely.

Curren was still the strong favorite when the pair met in the final, but Becker played with a confidence beyond his years and beat the odds.

Image: Jesper Giortz-Behrens

Granted, Niki Lauda was no underdog. He was born into a wealthy family in Austria, and at the height of his career, he drove for Ferrari. But, what makes his story so interesting is the fact that he came back from a terrible accident at the Nürburgring in 1976, when he became trapped in his car and suffered very severe burns.

After experiencing those injuries, he returned to the track just six weeks later, appearing at Monza with his burns still bandaged, and only lost the 1976 championship by a point to James Hunt after retiring from the Japanese Grand Prix due to unsafe conditions.

Image: dylan nolte

Ronda "Rowdy" Rousey was not supposed to lose her UFC bantamweight title in her match against Holly Holm. She was at the top of her game and had dominated her last three fights, winning them in 34, 16, and 14 seconds, and positioning her as the heavy favorite.

But the boxing specialist Holm dismissed all that, as she neutralized Rousey's peerless grappling skill and knocked out the favorite with a brutal second-round kick.

Image: Mike Bowman

Betting on a team that had won 10 of the last 12 pennants coming into the 1960 World Series would have seemed like a pretty sure thing, right? Think again.

The New York Yankees were the clear favorites but the Pittsburgh Pirates' Bill Mazeroski hit one of the most famous home runs in MLB baseball history in Game 7 and took the championship home.

Image: Chino Rocha

The legendary Roger Federer intended to win his sixth consecutive US Open championship in New York and it seemed like a very possible thing for the Swiss to achieve. But things did not go according to plan when the tall Argentine Juan Martin del Potro, the No. 6 seed, managed to upset the then-world No. 1.

Del Potro forced the winner to play five sets before taking the fifth 6-2. Given that Del Potro defeated Federer and never won another major title, this result has never ceased to amaze.

Image: Soheb Zaidi

Being an unknown player in a high-profile tournament is not the kind of thing that makes you an instant favorite, and not even being expected to play adds another layer of uncertainty. John Daly found himself in that very predicament going into the 1991 USPGA Championship.

As it happened, Nick Price withdrew to be at the birth of his first child. And eight players on the alternates list could not get to Crooked Stick, Indianapolis to replace Price. But the ninth reserve got in his car, drove through the night, and arrived there on Thursday ready to play.

Daly became an instant crowd favorite and with their backing went on to defy odds of 1000-1 to win the major.

Image: Markus Spiske

And a miracle it was. At least for the audience who might not have been aware of the hard work that led to such an epic victory. The United States men’s Olympic hockey team was not exactly poised to defeat the mighty Soviet hockey machine at the 1980 Winter Olympics Ice Hockey final in Lake Placid. But it did.

The Soviet team had dominated for years, and even the most hopeful wondered if the United States would even score in the game, let alone win. Instead, Team USA pulled off an amazing upset, winning the game 4-3 and earning themselves a place in history.

Image: Metin Ozer

Living up to your nickname can be hard if it is "The Greatest". But that was not the case for the legendary boxer, Muhammad Ali, who regained his heavyweight title after three years of exile.

The road was not a direct path to glory as, upon his return, he lost to Joe Frazier and Ken Norton. But the unthinkable (for most) happened after that when he beat the fearsome George Foreman who had dismantled Norton and Frazier both inside two brutal rounds.

Ali’s tactics in the "Rumble in the Jungle" saw him knock out an exhausted Foreman in the eighth round and win back the heavyweight title at the ripe age of 32.