Did you know that the word ?cyclone? was coined in Calcutta by an Englishman in the middle of the 19th century? Henry Piddington, a former sea captain serving as the president of the Marine Court of Calcutta, was studying the stormy weather of the Indian Ocean. He had particularly focused on the devastating tropical storm of December 1789 that inundated the coastal town of Coringa with three monstrous storm waves that killed more than 20,000. In a presentation to Asiatic Society of Bengal around 1840, Piddington described that storm as a ?cyclone,? a term derived from the Greek word ?kyklon?, which means moving in a circle, like the ?coil of the snake?.

Piddington introduced the word to mariners in his 1848 book The Sailor?s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms. ?I suggest that we might, for all this last class of circular or highly curved winds, adopt the term ?Cyclone? from the Greek kyklos (which signifies amongst other things the coil of a snake) as expressing sufficiently the tendency to circular motion in these meteors,? he wrote. Such trivia abound in the English language. Let us take a look at some nuggets.

•The word ?set? has the highest number of separate definitions in the English language (192 definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary.)

• Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down ? hence the expression ?to get fired?.

• In the Middle Ages, young men and women drew names from a bowl to see who their valentines would be. They would wear these names on their sleeves for one week. To wear your heart on your sleeve now means that it is easy for other people to know how you are feeling.

• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.

• ?Ough? can be pronounced in eight different ways. The following sentence contains them all: ?A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully.?

• ?Rhythms? is the longest English word without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, or u.

• The ancient Romans built such an excellent system of roads that the saying arose ?all roads lead to Rome,? that is, no matter which road one starts a journey on, he will finally reach Rome if he keeps on travelling. The popular saying came to mean that all ways or methods of doing something end in the same result, no method being better than another.

• The last thing to happen is the ultimate. The next-to-last is the penultimate, and the second-to-last is the antepenultimate.

•The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

• The term ?throw one?s hat in the ring? comes from boxing, where throwing a hat into the ring once signified a challenge. Today it nearly always signifies political candidacy.

•?Coach? is derived from the village of Kocs, Hungary, where coaches were invented and first used.

• The word ?news? came from the first letters of the words North, East, West and South. This was because information was being gathered from all different directions.