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Tall and high are basically synonyms but while you can say “a tall / high building” you can only say “a tall person”.

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The sound “sh” can be represented in 14 different ways: shoe, sugar, champagne, passion, ambitious, ocean, etc. 

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There is a larger variety of accents in Britain than in the United States.

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In modern England it is considered more refined to pronounce “ate” as /et/, instead of /eit/.

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The International Phonetic Alphabet is composed of 52 sounds in English, divided equally between vowels and consonants.

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The letters “ough” can be pronounced in eight different ways, as in: through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough and lough (an Irish-English word for “lake”)

 

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The word “goodbye” comes from the expression God-be-with-you, while “hello” comes from the Old English “hal beo thu” o “whole be thou”.

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The word “nice” was first recorded in 1290 and it meant “stupid and foolish”.

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The verb “tell” used to mean “to count”. This meaning still persists in the American expression “bank teller” (cajero de banco) and when we refer to the person who counts votes.

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English has borrowed words from a large variety of places and languages. In fact, at least half of its common words do not have an Anglo-Saxon origin. Some examples are:
- “shampoo” from India
- “ketchup” from China
- “potato” from Haiti
- “sofa” from Arabia
- “slogan” from Gaelic
- “breeze” from the Spanish “brisa”
- “bankrupt” from the Italian “banca rotta”

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There are still 250 irregular verbs in English.