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the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Bill Newton (8 June 1919 – 29 March 1943) was an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross, honoured for his actions as a bomber pilot in Papua New Guinea during March 1943. Raised in Melbourne, he joined the Citizen Military Forces in 1938 and enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in ...
Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki.Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of April 2024, it was ranked fourth by Semrush, and seventh by Similarweb.
English is the largest language by number of speakers. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on islands in all the major oceans. The countries where English is spoken can be grouped into different categories according to how English is used
- Letter Names
- Diacritics
- Punctuation Marks Within Words
- Frequencies
- Phonology
- History
- Proposed Reforms
- See Also
- Notes and References
The names of the letters are commonly spelled out in compound words and initialisms (e.g., tee-shirt, deejay, emcee, okay, etc.), derived forms (e.g., exed out, effing, to eff and blind black man, aitchless, etc.), and objects named after letters (e.g., en and em in printing, and wye in railroading). The spellings listed below are from the Oxford E...
The most common diacritic marks seen in English publications are the acute (é), grave (è), circumflex (â, î, or ô), tilde (ñ), umlaut and diaeresis (ü or ï—the same symbol is used for two different purposes), and cedilla (ç). Diacritics used for tonal languages may be replaced with tonal numbersor omitted.
Apostrophe
The apostrophe (ʼ) is not usually considered part of the English alphabet nor used as a diacritic, even in loanwords. But it is used for two important purposes in written English: to mark the "possessive"[o] and to mark contractedwords. Current standards require its use for both purposes. Therefore, apostrophes are necessary to spell many words even in isolation, unlike most punctuation marks, which are concerned with indicating sentence structure and other relationships among multiple words....
Hyphen
Hyphens are often used in English compound words. Written compound words may be hyphenated, open or closed, so specifics are guided by stylistic policy. Some writers may use a slashin certain instances.
The letter most commonly used in English is E. The least used letter is Z. The frequencies shown in the table may differ in practice according to the type of text.
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively. The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth"). Very rarely, W may represent a vowel (as in "cwm", ...
Old English
The English language itself was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself, by Anglo-Saxonsettlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, mostly as short inscriptions or fragments. The Latin script, introduced by Christian missionaries, began to replace the Anglo-Saxon futhorc from about the 7th century, although the two c...
Modern English
In the orthography of Modern English, the letters thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ), ash (æ), and ethel (œ) are obsolete. Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of æ and œ into Middle English and Early Modern English, though they are largely obsolete (see "Ligatures in recent usage" below), and where they are used they are not considered to be separate letters (e.g., for collation purposes), but rather ligatures. Thorn and eth were both replaced by th, though thorn continued in existen...
Ligatures in recent usage
Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, ligatures are seldom used in modern English. The ligatures æ and œ were until the 19th century (slightly later in American English)[citation needed] used in formal writing for certain words of Greek or Latin origin, such as encyclopædia and cœlom, although such ligatures were not used in either classical Latin or ancient Greek. These are now usually rendered as "ae" and "oe" in all types of writ...
There have been a number of proposals to extend or replace the basic English alphabet. These include proposals for the addition of letters to the English alphabet, such as eng or engma (Ŋ ŋ), used to replace the digraph "ng" and represent the voiced velar nasal sound with a single letter. Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet, based on the Latin al...
Further reading
1. Michael Rosen (2015). Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story. Counterpoint. ISBN 978-1619027022. 2. Upward, Christopher; Davidson, George (2011), The History of English Spelling, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-9024-4, LCCN 2011008794.
Edits to English Wikipedia by country as of January 2022. English Wikipedia (marked blue in the graph) is the most-read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of the website's global traffic as of 2021. The English Wikipedia is the most edited Wikipedia's language version of all time.
Wikipedia currently has more than sixty-three million articles in more than 300 languages, including 6,830,928 articles in English, with 119,604 active contributors in the past month. Wikipedia's fundamental principles are summarized in its five pillars .
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers . It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties, and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
