Paranoid Facts Page

The oldest words found in the English language are more than 10,000 years old--and possibly as ancient as 40,000 years old--originating in a pre-Indo-European language group called Nostratic ("our language"). Words from this language group that have survived into modern English include "I," "who," "two," "three," "five" and "apple."
"I am" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language, though some would argue that the shortest complete sentence is "Go."
The English letter combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways: "After a rough tumble into a slough, the thoughtful ploughman coughed and hiccoughed as he searched through the bakeries of Scarborough for dough."
The seven letter word "therein" contains a whopping ten words without rearranging any of its letters: "therein," "there," "the," "herein," "here," "her," "he," "ere," "rein," and "in."
The only 15-letter word in the English language that can be spelled without repeating a letter previously used in the word is "uncopyrightable."
"Skepticisms" is the longest word in the English language that alternates hands for each letter while being typed into a standard QWERTY keyboard.
An average typist on an average work day will walk their fingers over 12.6 miles of keyboard.
It is commonly held that Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was the first novel written on a typewriter (a Remington model). This "fact" was established by Clemens himself in his 1904 Unpublished Autobiography, where he wrote that "he believed" Tom Sawyer was "probably" his first. However, evidence suggests that it was actually his 1883 novel, Life on the Mississippi, that was the first submitted as a typewritten manuscript, and that that copy had been dictated to a typist, based on an original, hand-written draft.
Nigel Tomm holds the record for the longest sentence in publication in the English language, with a sentence composed of 469,375 words in The Blah Story, Volume 4 (Booksurge Publishing, 2007). The 128-page Czech novel, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal (Harcourt, 1995), is composed in one complete sentence.
Obscure author Ernest Vincent Wright (1873?-1939) published his most famous novel within mere months of his death. Titled Gadsby, it contains 50,110 words, yet does not contain the letter e. In spite of this omission, the narration is grammatically correct, and every word is spelled properly. This type of constrained writing is known as a pangrammatic lipogram.
Pope Pius II wrote an erotic book "Historia de duobos amantibus" (The Tale of the Two Lovers) in 1444, which was among the bestselling books of the 15th century. One of the first takes on the epistolary novel, it was published 14 years before Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini became Pope.
Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal category.
The Bible is the world's bestselling book. It is also the most shoplifted book in the world.