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Actually, it’s very easy.
It’s is always short for “it is” or “it has”.
Its means “belonging to it” and is a possessive pronoun like “his”.
Based on evidence from the billion-word Oxford English Corpus, Oxford have identified the hundred commonest English words found in writing globally:
1. the
2. be
3. to
4. of
5. and
6. a
7. in
(more…)
The publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary quote “loccinaucinihilipilification” (29 letters) as the longest genuine word, followed by “antidisestablishmentarianism“ (28 letters). According to Oxford, although there are a few other words that are longer, they are mainly technical words or invented for the purpose.
I can now reveal that in fact “smiles” is the longest genuine word in the English language because there is a mile between its first and last letters.
If we take the word DOG and change its letters around we can get GOD. That is an anagram - a word (or phrase) made by mixing up the letters of another word (or phrase). The DOG = GOD example is a very simple anagram. Another example would be CINEMA = ICEMAN.
But the cleverest anagrams are much more complicated and often have some relationship to the original words:
Astronomer = Moon starer
Debit card = Bad credit
Schoolmaster = The classroom
Halley’s Comet = Shall yet come
Punishment = Nine Thumps
Fleas
Adam
Had ‘em.
(Anon.)
