One millionth English word could be 'defriend' or 'noob'

Adam   Wed May 06, 2009 6:01 pm GMT
On 10th June, a milestone will be passed.

The English language will acquire its one MILLIONTH word.

At the moment, new words in English are coined every 98 minutes, the best record since Shakespeare's day.


One millionth English word could be 'defriend' or 'noob'


The English language will celebrate its one millionth word next month, with "defriend", "noob" and "chiconomics" among the candidates, linguistic experts have predicted.

By Matthew Moore
06 May 2009

The milestone will be passed at 10.22am on June 10 according to the Global Language Monitor, an association of academics that tracks the use of new words.

The widespread popularity of English as a second language in Asia has brought about the most fertile period of word generation since William Shakespeare's time with new terms coined on average every 98 minutes, the Texas-based group claims.

It acknowledges new words once they have been used 25,000 times by media outlets, on social networking websites and in other sources.

The terms it is currently monitoring which could take English to the one million threshold include "defollow" and "defriend", words describing what users of websites like Twitter and Facebook to do contacts with whom they do not wish to stay in touch.

Another internet word "noob" – a derogatory name for someone new to a particular task or community – is also in the running, along with "greenwashing" (what companies do to appear environmentally friendly) and "chiconomics" (recession fashion).

Paul Payack, chief analyst at the Global Language Monitor, said: "Despite having a million words at our disposal it is unlikely that we will ever use more than just a tiny fraction of them.

"The average persons vocabulary is fewer than 14,000 words out of these million that are available. A person who is linguistically gifted would only use 70,000 words."

The organisation first predicted that the millionth English word was imminent in 2006, and has repeatedly pushed back the expected date.

Other linguist have expressed scepticism about its methods, claiming that there is no agreement about how to classify a word.

telegraph.co.uk
Lazar   Wed May 06, 2009 6:32 pm GMT
That is utter nonsense, as you can read here ( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=972 ). The supposed "millionth word" is to be found whenever it's convenient for Paul Payack's publicity needs.
Eddy   Thu May 07, 2009 3:55 am GMT
Adam, you seemed to have also said this in 2006

Adam Thu Apr 13, 2006 4:59 pm GMT
The English language is about to reach the 1 million word milestone, according to the estimates by some experts.

Although other people say different things.

BRITISH English uses SIX TIMES as many words as French (if you believe those people who say English uses "only" 600,000 words rather than almost a million) as French uses only 100,000 words - compared with 125,000 for Russian, 200,000 for German and 225,000 for Spanish.
----------------------------------------------------

English language nears the one million-word milestone
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 13 April 2006

It will not be of much comfort to President George Bush and others who, on occasion, struggle to make themselves understood. But some time soon the English language, according to at least one reasonably authoritative source, will create its one-millionth word.

The Global Language Monitor (GLM), a San Diego-based linguistic consultancy, reckoned that on 21 March (the vernal equinox) this year, there were about 988,968 words in the language, "plus or minus a handful". At the current rate of progress, the one-million mark will be reached this summer.

And how does the GLM know? It started, it says, with a base vocabulary drawn from major dictionaries that contain the historic core of the language. Then it created its own algorithm, or formula, called the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), that measures the language as found in print, electronic media, and on television and radio. That establishes a rate of increase in the creation of new words, and the import and absorption of foreign words into English.

No one argues about the huge richness of the English language - fed by Germanic, Scandinavian and Latin streams, unrivalled in its readiness to borrow from every language, and mercifully free of tiresome bodies like the Academié Française to decide what counts and what does not.

The process is only reinforced by the universality of English. True, more people (more than a billion) may be native speakers of Mandarin Chinese than of English (an estimated 500 million or so, roughly the same as Hindi). French, incidentally, only limps into the top 10 with 130 million native speakers.

But if there is such a thing as a world language, it is English, spread first by the British Empire, then by the economic, cultural and military juggernaut of the US, and now by the internet. And, at every stop on the way, new words are coined, or scooped up from other languages.

But how many and how fast? The GLM claims that its projected figures are conservative - and in fact some estimates put the total of English words at two million or more. The devil lies in definition: what constitutes a new word? Does slang count? And what about archaisms and obsolete words? Another study, the Life and Times of the English Language, by Robert Claiborne and published in 1990, puts the number of words at no more than 600,000. The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 300,000 head words, and some 615,000 "word forms," that include the head words, plus combinations and derivatives. By contrast, Websters Third International Dictionary has 54,000 word families - base words, inflections and derivations.

But no one should feel intimidated. The average vocabulary of an educated native English speaker is about 24,000 to 30,000. Shakespeare used 24,000 words - 1,700 of which he is claimed to have invented.

Nonetheless, with an active vocabulary of just 3,000 or so, you can get along pretty well. And if you are stumped for a word, just make one up. It seems to have worked in the past for the most powerful man in the world, so it could work for you as well. The chances are, it will soon be swept up in the boundless net of the Global Language Monitor. You never know, it might even be the coveted number 1,000,000.

Comparing languages

* Up to 20 per cent of the words used by Global Language Monitor come from hybrids such as Chinglish and Japlish. Words from Chinglish include the business terms "drinktea", meaning closed, and "torunbusiness", meaning open. Bushisms such as "uninalienable" and 'misunderestimate' are included.

* English is evolving faster than other languages. This year's additions to the Oxford English Dictionary include "podcast" and "offshoring".

* Spanish linguists say there are 225,000 words in contemporary use.

* The largest edition of the Duden German-German dictionary contains about 200,000 words

* The Russian language has just reached the 125,000 mark.

* French has 100,000 words, one-sixth of the figure used in the UK. But the Academié Française, the body that defines the language, recognises 25,525.

news.independent.co.uk . . .
lameness   Thu May 07, 2009 4:11 am GMT
English is just more lax when stealing words from other languages. Basically they just said "and from now on let all French, Greek and Latin words be English words". And from then on all French, Greek and Latin words were English words.

Maybe in the future Spanish speakers will declare "let all English words be Spanish words", and then all English words will be Spanish words and Spanish will have 1 million + 200 000 words and become the language with the greatest vocabulary!
Travis   Thu May 07, 2009 5:03 am GMT
It is awfully silly to try to count words in English, as English allows quite freeform word-formation in practice, in which speakers have a lot of freedom to create new words as they see fit. Okay, if they mean counting words in some given dictionary (such as the Oxford English Dictionary), that is another story, but what exact relevance does the particular number of words in some given dictionary have?
Guest   Thu May 07, 2009 6:07 am GMT
Nationalism?
greg   Thu May 07, 2009 7:12 am GMT
Travis : « It is awfully silly to try to count words in English, as English allows quite freeform word-formation in practice, in which speakers have a lot of freedom to create new words as they see fit. Okay, if they mean counting words in some given dictionary (such as the Oxford English Dictionary), that is another story, but what exact relevance does the particular number of words in some given dictionary have? »

Absolument ! D'ailleurs c'est le cas de toutes les langues pour lesquelles un dictionnaire de mots est possible (il existe des langues où un dictionnaire de mots n'est pas envisageable au sens où nous l'entendons).





Adam : « bla bla bla ».

Tu crois sérieusement que le lexique d'une langue fonctionne comme la clientèle d'un supermarché ? Tu peux toujours faire gagner une voiture au 10.000e chaland qui se présente à l'entrée d'une grande surface, mais tu ne pourras jamais identifier le 10.000e mot d'un dictionnaire. C'est impossible.
Leasnam   Thu May 07, 2009 8:11 pm GMT
<<It is awfully silly to try to count words in English, as English allows quite freeform word-formation in practice, in which speakers have a lot of freedom to create new words as they see fit. Okay, if they mean counting words in some given dictionary (such as the Oxford English Dictionary), that is another story, but what exact relevance does the particular number of words in some given dictionary have? >>

I agree as well. The English dictionary neither tells nor houses all the words in the English language that can be used. Many as you've pointed out, like freeform compounds "bread knife" and "trade embargo" are rarely listed, while others such as "airplane safety" and "farming technique" are never regarded as single concepts or words but should be because they are.
Travis   Fri May 08, 2009 1:59 am GMT
>>I agree as well. The English dictionary neither tells nor houses all the words in the English language that can be used. Many as you've pointed out, like freeform compounds "bread knife" and "trade embargo" are rarely listed, while others such as "airplane safety" and "farming technique" are never regarded as single concepts or words but should be because they are.<<

People often miss that such are really just single words just because they are written with spaces rather than without them, unlike in most other Germanic languages.
Guest   Sat May 09, 2009 4:48 pm GMT
English already has more than a trillion words.
slumdog   Sat Jun 13, 2009 2:52 pm GMT
http://www.languagemonitor.com/

"Web 2.0 beats Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English Word"

Is >web 2.0< even a word?
What do you say?
word   Sat Jun 13, 2009 3:00 pm GMT
>> >web 2.0< even a word? What do you say? <<<

Only if Windows NT 6.1 is.