English marches toward its millionth word

By BARRY GOTTLIEB

By the end of April 2009, the English language will be 1 million words strong. That is if you believe the Global Language Monitor, an organization that uses people combined with computer algorithms to track trends in languages around the world.

According to the Texas-based organization, English picks up a new word every 98 minutes — about 15 a day — or just enough to make my spell-checker feel really dumb.

The GLM doesn’t say anything about words being kicked out, so we can assume that English is the pack rat of languages and only gets bigger.

I’m not sure what the new words popping up every 98 minutes are, but I’m sure they’re along the lines of “repurpose,” “ginormous,” “hella” — and its grade-school equivalent, “hecka” — and “Obamalovefest,” which may not make it, depending on whether bankruptcy becomes the leveraged buyout of the decade.

A factor of five

A million words is way more than any dictionary includes. Standard dictionaries define about 200,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary has about 600,000. That means either the GLM has heard words the Oxford people haven’t, or it stopped counting after “obfuscation,” or it knows no one is going to go down the list and count them all.

A million seems like a lot of words. But if you figure there are about 1.3 billion people who speak English, that’s only one word for every 1,350 speakers. I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to find out I was one of those people who didn’t have a personal word, though should that happen I’d make one up just so I could feel important. Maybe a word such as “grobwich.” Or “pongroid.” If I can persuade the GLM to recognize these, then I will have gotten us to Million Word Day a bit sooner.

But do we really need a million words?

A factor of 50

The typical American knows about 20,000 words but uses only 7,500 of them in a given day. This means that on many days, we have 12,500 unused words gathering dust in the crannies of our cerebellum. That being the case, what could we possibly do with 980,000 more of them? As it is, I’m afraid that if I stuff one more thing into the right side of my head, my Social Security number’s going to fall out my left ear.

The GLM estimates that the millionth word will show up near April 29, but it could be as soon as March 30, which makes it difficult to plan a Million Word Party.

But while we’re waiting for another ginormous number of hella repurposed words to join the language, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to come across another, uh, classic — like grody, Y2K or macarena. How pongroid!

X Gottlieb, the author of “If It’s Such a Small World Then Why Have I Been Sitting on This Airplane For Twelve Hours?” writes at maddogproductions.com.