English is closing in on its millionth word
English always has been something of a mongrel language, but thanks to e-mail and the Internet, the spread of English around the world, and a playful response to changing times, new words and phrases are cropping up so quickly that one language watcher calculates that English is bearing down on a milestone — its one-millionth word.
"English is like an open language that absorbs every type of word from all different languages," said Paul Payack, who runs Global Language Monitor, a Web site and language consulting business. "English is a people's language. It grows from the ground up."
Payack, whose Web-based word-watching started in 1999 with the site YourDictionary.com, figures there are about 995,000 words in the English language. Sometime this year, he forecasts, the mother tongue of Shakespeare and Lincoln will tip over the seven-figure mark.
Using a series of mathematical formulas, Payack tracks new words as they crop up in databases of printed materials, such as major newspapers and magazines, and on the Internet.
If the number of citations reaches what Payack considers a critical mass, he adds the word to his master lexicon, which he compiled by assembling the word lists of about a dozen major English dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's unabridged dictionary.
Among his recent additions are "bagonize," to describe the agonizing feeling of waiting for your luggage at an airport baggage carousel, and "smirting," the combination of smoking and flirting that takes place in doorways in an era when indoor smoking is increasingly taboo.
But not every would-be word makes the cut. He recently tested "nakation," a vacation where clothing is optional. Google turned up 34 references.
"That would not make it as a word," he said.
Scholars and dictionary editors cast doubt on Payack's methods and say that an accurate word count is impossible. But they agree that English has word-spinning built into its DNA.
The language has Germanic origins, but French was grafted onto it when the French-speaking Normans conquered England in 1066. During the Renaissance, Latin words became the vogue, and as the British empire spread around the globe, its colonies contributed their own distinctive flavors to the language of the rulers.
Recent comments
A million words. And my students still can't spell a hundred of…
russ | Feb. 24, 2008 at 9:09 a.m.
