Words – Page 9 – Interesting Literature

The First Gothic Novel

The early Gothic novelists are an interesting lot. Matthew Lewis, known for his 1796 novel The Monk, wrote his will on a servant’s hat while dying on board a ship from Jamaica to the UK. William Beckford wrote the bestselling Gothic novel Vathek in French in 1782, with the English version being translated by a vicar four years later. … Read more

Words You Need to Know for Easter

The Easter weekend is upon us, so we’ve turned our literary sights to those words which have an Easter connection. Got your eggs and your hot cross buns at the ready? Then why not sit back, have a bite to eat, and gorge yourself on these literary facts. If you like word facts, check out our compendium of great facts about the English language here.

Is Your Vocabulary Greater Than Shakespeare’s?

We came across a nice site that tests your vocabulary in a short ‘quiz’ (of sorts) that takes only a few minutes to complete. It’s an interesting little test, because it will calculate (by which we really mean ‘estimate’) your vocabulary, or total number of words which you could practically use in conversation or writing. … Read more

The Longest Words in Literature

What’s the longest ever word in literature? The longest word in the English language (leaving literature to one side for a moment) is a staggering 189,819 letters long. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. The chemical formula for the protein otherwise known as titin runs to 189,819 letters, but whether this constitutes a ‘word’ … Read more

Twitter Terms and Literature

The word ‘tweet’ – meaning to post a message or item of information on Twitter – has this month (June 2013) been added to the Oxford English Dictionary or OED. In honour of this occasion, we thought we’d offer some interesting facts about terms associated with Twitter, and the stories surrounding their earlier uses. Many of them have … Read more