petrichor
PET-ri-kor
The smell of rain hitting dry earth
Coined by two scientists in 1964 from the Greek for stone and the fluid in the veins of the gods.
One of the very few beautiful words with a birth certificate.
The archive
English
Owned by its second-language speakers
The only major language in history whose non-native speakers outnumber its native ones three to one.
FamilyProto-Indo-European › Germanic › West Germanic › English
ScriptLatin
Speakers1.5B 390M native · 1.1B second
Weeks to a working levelThis is the language the FSI scale is measured from.
The first hundred words cover59.0% and the first thousand 83.8%
- About 1.53 billion speakers, of whom roughly 390 million grew up with it. Most conversations in English today happen between two people who learned it.
- Roughly a third of its vocabulary arrived from French after 1066, which is why it has doubles for everything: begin and commence, freedom and liberty.
- It lost its cases and its grammatical gender, which is why it now leans so hard on word order.
- The spelling was frozen by printing just as the pronunciation was shifting, which is the whole reason for though, through and tough.
- It has no academy and never has. Nobody is in charge of it, which is not true of French, Spanish or Italian.
- Britain and America split on one past participle. Britain says I have got, America says I have gotten, and gotten is the older form: it is in the King James Bible, and Britain dropped it after exporting it.
- Two brand names became ordinary words on one side of the Atlantic only. Britain hoovers the floor and asks for a plaster; America vacuums it and asks for a Band-Aid. The term for that is a proprietary eponym.
- Zipper was coined in 1923 by an American company, after the sound the fastener makes. Britain kept the object and shortened the word back to zip.
- The last letter has two names and neither side has moved. The exception is Gen Z, which most Britons say the American way, because in that phrase it has stopped feeling like a letter.
- Over half the web is written in it, along with the overwhelming majority of scientific publishing, and it is the default of international contracts, aviation and shipping.
- It carries the best documented wage premium of any second language. Studies from South Korea to Turkey to Latin America find speakers earning measurably more than similar colleagues who do not have it, in countries where English is not official at all.
- The language English blames when it understands nothing is Greek. The phrase comes from the monasteries: a scribe who hit a Greek passage wrote Graecum est, non legitur in the margin, it is Greek, it does not get read, and moved on.
The auxiliary language of the planet: 1.5 billion speakers and most of them learned it. The hundred commonest words cover more of daily speech than almost any other language here. If it is not yours yet, nothing else on this site pays better: films, science, the internet and a billion conversations, all behind one door.
Words with no translation
gloaming
GLO-ming
The last light after sunset, before the dark
Old and northern.
Twilight is the technical word.
Gloaming is the one you would use for someone you like.
faff
faff
Busy activity that achieves nothing
British to the bone.
It contains a light contempt that procrastinate is too formal to carry.
kerfuffle
ker-FUF-ful
A small commotion over something not worth it
The sound of the word does most of the work, which is why it survives while its serious synonyms die.
sonder
SON-der
The jolt of realising every stranger has a life as full and complicated as yours
Honest label, because it matters here: sonder is not German. It was coined in English in 2012 by John Koenig for his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and it has spread far enough that people now assume it is old and foreign.
German does have sonder-, a prefix meaning separate or special, and French has the verb sonder, to probe or take a sounding. Neither means this.
It earns its place anyway: the concept had no word until someone made one, which is the whole argument of this page, arriving from the other direction.
Next to its neighbours
Where English parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
English vs German → English vs Dutch → English vs Afrikaans →
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak English with.
The English Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in English
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.