China’s Singles Day, which falls on Nov. 11 every year, has far surpassed its U. S. counterparts of Black Friday and Cyber Monday—combined Last year, Americans spent a record $ 12.8 billion online between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday. It’s impressive until you compare it to the $ 17.6 billion in sales made by Chinese consumers in a single 24-hour period during 2016’s Singles Day.

Singles Day is known as “Bare Sticks Day” or “Bare Branches Day” in Chinese-because the date “11/11” looks like bare branches and “one” is the loneliest number. Singles Day began in the early 1990s in the dorm rooms of Nanjing University when a group of single friends were sorry about the lack of significant others and decided to mark the day by organizing activities as a group of singles and reducing their loneliness by buying themselves a gift.

Then in 2009, sensing a break between the sales period of China’s National Day on Oct. 1 and Chinese New Year in late January or early February, Alibaba’s Jack Ma saw an opening: sell to comfort lonely hearts.

The first year did only $7.5 million in sales, but just 8 years later, shoppers spent $ 25.3 billion, or 168.2 billion yuan, this year—a 40 percent jump from last year’s $ 17.6 billion. For comparison, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U. S. only netted $ 6.79 billion in 2016. Amazon doesn’t release sales figures for July’s Prime Day, but it’s pretty safe to believe the not-quite-national-holiday doesn’t come close to $ 25 billion.

“More than $ 25 billion in one day is not just a sales figure,” Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang said in a statement. “It represents the desire for quality consumption of the Chinese consumer, and it reflects how merchants and consumers alike have now fully accepted the combination of online and offline sales.”

Language teachers, learners and other professionals across the USA are celebrating National Grammar Day on March 4. The holiday, created by Martha Brockenbrough in 2008, celebrates the rules and best practices for the English language. Brockenbrough is the founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, or SPOGG, which operates a website where Brockenbrough writes about different language issues.

Mignon Fogarty, who is organizing National Grammar Day celebrations this year, wrote the book “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.” Fogarty appeared on the NBC television program “Today” on Wednesday. She discussed new additions to the English language. “People think that dictionaries choose new words because they are proper, she said.” But mostly they choose words because people use them.”

The American Dialect Society chooses a word every year that is new or used in a new way .The choice for 2015 Word of the Year was “they,” used to refer to “he” or “she”. The Oxford English Dictionary adds new words after finding evidence people are using the words often. Researchers for the dictionary also look for evidence the words will be used well into the future.

Grammarly is a software application, or app, which can study writing and find grammar mistakes. In preparation for National Grammar Day, Grammarly studied the writing on the Twitter accounts of the 50 people with the most followers in the world and counted the average number of mistakes in their writing. Then the top 10 accounts with the fewest mistakes were listed.

Comedian Conan O’Brien had the best grammar. He averaged 0.21 mistakes for every 100 words he wrote. Businessman Bill Gates had the second best grammar, with an average of 0.22 mistakes. President Barack Obama came third with an average of 0.26 mistakes.

The National Grammar Day website has many resources for language learners. You can celebrate the day by reading our weekly series “Everyday Grammar.”