Has English reached its millionth word?
Monday, 24th August 2009
If recent reports are to be believed, English acquired its millionth word on 10th June 2009.
According to a report in the Guardian, the Global Language Monitor (GLM) in Texas believe that a new word is adding to English every 98 minutes on average, or 14.7 words a day, and that the language must have reached its millionth word this year, which they suggest is “Web 2.0”.
The GLM tracks the usage of new words online and charges businesses for monitoring the online mentions of their names. If a word has been mentioned online at least 25,000 times they recognise them as legitimate. They also look at the extent of the geographical spread of words.
Some linguists have dismissed the GLM’s claims as nonsense and believe that there are many more than a million words in English, although it depends what kind of words you include.
Lexicographers, who will only include words in their dictionaries if they meet particular criteria such as their appearance in print and their length of use, believe that it is impossible to know the exact size of the vocabulary of English. If you include all the technical, specialist, dialect and slang terms, English has far more than a million words. If you exclude the specialist and technical words, English has perhaps 750,000 words. The 2005 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, lists 301,100 main entries and 616,500 word forms.
There are numerous words that are used only in particular regions or professions, and there are many varieties of language which combine English and other languages, including Singlish (Singaporean English), Spanglish (Spanish/English) and Denglish (German/English). They tend to combine vocabulary and grammar from both of the languages involved. If you consider them types of English, then all their vocabulary can be included among English vocabulary, but if you see them as new varieties of language that are neither English nor the other languages, perhaps their vocabulary shouldn’t be included. Singlish, for example, includes many words from varieties of Chinese such as Hokkien, including particles like lah, leh and lor – these are only used in Singapore and Malaysia so cannot really be considered English, or at least only regional English.
However many words there are in English, the average vocabulary of individuals has been estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 words – slightly fewer than 1 million!
Tags: vocabulary, language, languages, english
Posted by Simon Ager 2009-08 under Vocabulary,
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