It was on this day in the year 1877 that the American daily, The Washington Post, was first published. It is the oldest existing newspaper in the area, and is the most widely circulated newspaper published in Washington, D.C. Needless to say, The Washington Post is one of the leading dailies in the United States of America. The newspaper has won …
Ada Lovelace, the English mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron, was chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s analytical machine, or the computer. She worked on the engine with notes of her own, which are recognized today as the world’s first computer programme.
There are very, very few words in the English language where vowels aren’t used. And ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language. There are 21 ‘e’s in the previous two sentences alone! Then, imagine how much difficult it must have been to write Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel without the letter ‘e’! Except for …
A fortnight means fourteen days. The word ‘fortnight’ is derived from the old English word ‘fēowertīeneniht’ which means ‘fourteen nights’. In the US, ‘two weeks’ is more commonly used instead of ‘a fortnight’. ‘Fortnightly’ is commonly used in the context of payment of salaries. In North America, however, ‘biweekly’ is more frequently used.
The term bungalow gained currency in India in the seventeenth century when the English East India Company officers started coming to India. It is derived from the Hindi word bangla, which means belonging to Bengal. Bungalows are generally one and half-storeyed houses with a front porch. The architecture of bungalows is archetypal of eastern Indian residential buildings.
The name dinosaur is derived from two Greek words: deinos meaning ‘fearfully great’ and sauros meaning ‘lizard’. It was coined by the English anatomist Richard Owen in 1842. Owen recognized that the huge fossilized bones unearthed at several places in nineteenth-century England were markedly different from the bones of the other existing reptiles.
