Now there are one million reasons never to be lost for words again

Published on Wednesday 10 June 2009 22:02

FOR those struggling to find the right word comes some good news – for the first time there are more than a million to choose from.

At precisely 11:22am Stratford-upon-Avon time yesterday, chosen to honour the birthplace of William Shakespeare, the phrase "Web 2.0" entered the English language as its official millionth word.

The technical term, meaning the next generation of services on the world wide web, beat others from around the world, according to Texas-based Global Language Monitor, which studies words and their origins.

The English language originates a new word every 98 minutes, or 14.7 words a day, according to the group's calculations.

Web 2.0 passed from technological jargon into mainstream use yesterday morning, an hour and a half after "Jai Ho", a Hindi exclamation signifying victory.

Close to the milestone were a video gaming term, "n00b", a mixture of letters and numbers which is a derisive term for a newcomer; and "slumdog", an impolite term for children living in the slums in India.

Also entering mainstream vernacular was "wonderstar", a person like Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle who gains overnight fame by displaying skills or talents beyond reasonable expectation.

The linguists use a complicated mathematical formula to track the growth of "new" words and determine exactly when they qualify for inclusion in the English language codex.

The group's computers continually monitor more than 5,000 websites, dictionaries, newspapers, scientific papers and other publications, and consider a word legitimate when it has made 25,000 appearances.

But the words also have to make sense to 60 per cent of the world's 1.53 billion English speakers, meaning no recognition for many scientific phrases and technological terms.

Paul JJ Payack, group president and chief word analyst, said English has the biggest vocabulary of the world's 6,909 languages, boosted in recent years by the explosion of the internet and electronic media.

The Oxford English Dictionary contains 600,000 words, while the next most spoken language, Mandarin Chinese, has only about 450,000 words.

Critics say English has so many vagaries and variances it is impossible to accurately tally the number of words or state with certainty which is the millionth.

Allan Metcalf, English professor at MacMurray College in Illinois, said complications are words that might be spelled the same but have two or more different meanings, such as bear. He said: "You really can't be exact about a millionth word."

Mr Payack said: "The arguments are specious insofar as you can make the same argument for anything a human being can measure, the number of stars in the galaxy, the number of galaxies in the universe and the number of people on Earth."