English Language and One Million Words
According to linguistic expert Paul J.J. Payack and this 1,000,000 word story by CNN.com, the English language added its 1,000,000,000th word at 5:22 a.m. on Wednesday 10, 2009. Paul J.J. Payack is the chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor, and he created a program that measures how fast the English language is growing.
Counting One Million Words
Conventional linguists and traditionalists scoff at the notion that a person can count how fast a language is growing. The idea that we know which words should be counted and which ones don’t count is preposterous, according to many English and linguistics purists.
Coming to a consensus on the official size of the English language is problematic. Though there are numerous respected sources (dictionaries, for instance) on the English language, there are enough respected resources that no one stands out from the rest. Knowing how many English words there are is a little like figuring out how the heavyweight champion is, given the number of sanctioning bodies in professional boxing. For instance, the Oxford Dictionary and the Miriam-Webster Dictionary puts out their own word books, each with its own number of English words.
Which dictionary should have the official word count?
Oxford English Dictionary Word Count
The Oxford English Dictionary has around 600 thousand words in its lexicon. Oxford suggests other words exist in English, but they aren’t words you would include in a dictionary. (For instance, numbers go to infinity, while you could track ancestors back similarly, to one’s great-great-great-great-grandfather.) There are also questions as to whether one spelling with two meanings is two words or one.
Given all the moving parts to charting the English language, many linguists consider the 1,000,000th word to be hype and not substance.
One Million Words
Mr. Payack says that his measuring stick is scientific and collects data as proof that words are official, though. The Global Language Monitor keeps track of over 5,000 different websites and his magic number is 25,000 usages. If an English word is used 25,000 times, he considers it to be an accepted term by the general population and therefore an “official English word”. But in a larger sense, Mr. Payack says that his Global Language Monitor is proving a different point.
Payack notes that English is the largest language in the world, because English is now a truly global language. Given that English is spoken internationally among nations with another primary language, English has come to accept more words into it than any other language in history. The worldwide scope of English means that the language is growing and growing more complex every day. Languages such as French are a great deal more static, in part because it is a bit more choosy about which words get into the language.
In fact, Mandarin Chinese is the next biggest language, with just over 450,000 words. According to Paul J.J. Payack, then, English is at least twice as large.
I suppose that we’ll only know in retrospect who is right. If some 50 years from now, there are a million English words in use that were invented by the year 2009, we’ll know Mr. Payack and the Global Language Monitor.
Of course, given that words have lifespans, even that might be arguable.