The word 'cereal' comes from Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and harvest.

The word 'goodbye' is a contraction of 'God be with ye.'

The word 'emoji' is Japanese for 'picture character' — e (picture) + moji (character).

There are no true synonyms — words with similar meanings always differ in connotation or register.

The longest novel ever written is 'In Search of Lost Time' by Marcel Proust, with approximately 1.2 million words.

There are approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world — about half are expected to disappear by the end of the century.

Sign languages are complete natural languages — they are not universal and vary by country.

Sanskrit, an ancient Indo-European language, has the most perfect grammatical structure ever analyzed.

The word 'salary' derives from 'sal' (salt) — Roman soldiers were paid a salt allowance.