Hah! I Found a Mistake in One of those Lists of Facts

The list is titled English language did you knows, and it’s here. It’s someplace on did-you-knows .com, too. The rest of the list seems reasonable enough, but this goof makes me suspicious of the veracity of the rest of the list, even though no doubt at least some of them are true.

Anyway, here’s the mistake:

The first English dictionary was written in 1755

That’s a reference to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, the most famous early dictionary, but at least a dozen dictionaries preceded it. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia, and easy enough place to do research in.

Johnson’s dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English “wordbook” by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.

So there.

While I’m at it, the reference to “durst” being the past tense of “dare” isn’t quite right. “Durst” is obsolete. We use “dared” now. This list appears to be a collection of statements for several sources of varying quality.

By the way, the statement about “e” being the most common letter is true. The 12 most common letters, in order of frequency are etaoinshrdlu, a list I happen to have memorized.