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Did you know that according to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are around 700,000 words in the English language? Yet, the average native English speaker only uses about 30,000 of them actively—just 4% of the total!

On top of that, there are an estimated 5,000 to 20,000 idioms—those quirky, expressive phrases that don’t make literal sense on their own. It’s believed we regularly use several hundred of these in everyday conversation.

Many of these have been in use for centuries or even millennia, “a leopard can’t change its spots,“ dates back to the Bible and originates from the Book of Jeremiah (13:23), written around the 7th to 6th century BCE. The passage reads: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.”

Many of the idioms we use are also common in other languages, so you can impress your Chinese, French, or Spanish friends with these phrases!

• French: “Faire d’une pierre deux coups” (literally, “to make two hits with one stone”).
• Chinese: 一石二鸟 (“yī shí èr niǎo,” meaning “one stone, two birds”).
• Spanish: “Matar dos pájaros de un tiro” (literally, “to kill two birds with one shot”).

OR as we say in English “Kill two birds with one stone”

Did you know that the Taos Pueblo people of New Mexico believe we are each given a finite number of words to use in our lifetime? Once you’ve used up your quota, that’s it. It certainly puts a new spin on the phrase ‘choose your words wisely’!”