Keywords

Tallywhacker

Language

If you’ve missed the wonderful thread over at LanguageLog about the number of Eskimo words for snow then you should check out Mark Liberman’s latest post. This post contains back links to many of the key posts in the thread, as well as some wonderful factoids, including this one:

Only the English have 997 words for penis. … Along with the 1232 words for sexual intercourse, 856 words for vagina, 449 words for beer, 994 words for prostitutes, and 707 words for marijuana.

If 997 words for penis sounds like a lot, check out Woody’s World of Penis Euphemisms, which lists quite a few.

If you are interested in slang dictionaries, then perhaps you will be interested in this exhaustive three part history of slang dictionaries. Volume 1 covers only the period from 1567 to 1784! So perhaps even more interesting than the number of slang words in English, is our obsession with such words.

Previous
Next