Today's FrankieFunFact 2/23/2015

Words by F loBuono

Homonyms are words form the English language that sound the same but have different meanings, e.g. site and sight. Sometimes, they may even be spelled the same way and still have different meanings, e.g. bark - something that a dog does AND bark - the skin of a tree.

This led (or, is it lead) me to believe that, in terms of volume, English was lacking in words. Certainly, Italian, or French, or Chinese must have more. However, this is not the case. English, at over 250,000 words in current use, is the current World Champion of Language*. In fact, that's about double the amount of words used in most Romance languages! Linguists believe this is due (or, is it do) to the fact that English is an amalgamation of languages, borrowing from German, Latin, Greek and many other cultures.

So, it would be right (or, is it rite) to say that, in a multicultural world, English truly is the international language.


* the language with the least amount of words currently in use is Taki Taki, used by the people from Suriname. They use about 340.