One millionth English word

The millionth English word will be coined on June 10, 2009, according to the Global Language Monitor, a US company which monitors changes in the English language (article here). That is an utterly nonsensical statement to make. No-one can say for sure how many words there are in English. Even so, there are probably well over a million words in English already; there are over a million named species of insect, for instance, even though their names don't make it into the dictionary.

Shakespeare scholars have counted all the words in the Bard's works, yet the results they have come up with vary by over 10,000 words - and they are all reading exactly the same body of works! It's because they can't agree on the definition of a word, and nor can anyone else. If you were counting the number of words in English, would you count the word middle-aged, given that you have already counted middle and aged? Hundreds, if not thousands, of words in English can be spelt legitimately in more than one way - tsar/czar, jail/gaol, organise/organize, caftan/kaftan; do you count those pairs as one word or two? Would you count the words nisi and vitae as English words, given that they rarely appear on their own, but are usually found in combinations eg decree nisi, curriculum vitae? Are they English words anyway, or are they Latin? Are tagliatelle, cwm, Schadenfreude, laissez-faire etc English words? They're all in the dictionary. Would you count mouse as one word or two, given that it has two distinct meanings (squeaking animal and computer accessory)? The word pink can be a verb, adjective or noun; is it one word, or is it three? Is eat, eats, eating, ate and eaten one word or five? I would say one, but other people would disagree with me. Is coffeeholic a word? It's not in the dictionary, but you probably understand what I mean. What about slang and dialect words? Would you count them in the total? What about abbreviations and acronyms such as Mrs or asbo? Do you count obsolete words eg thee, thou, hast, hath etc? Would you count words that are common in, say, South African or Jamaican English, but not British English?

Trying to put a figure on the number of words in the language is a minefield.

Comments

[Laura Payne]

Very nicely stated.

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks Laura.

[Tomas]

I completely fail to see how mouse can be two words. It is one word with different meanings, dependant upon context.

Eats, eating, eaten and ate can never be the same word because words are a contained entity. Otherwise we would have to count humility and humiliate as one word, because they contain the same word even though they have different meanings.

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks for reading and commenting, Tomas. You've just proved how difficult it is to count the words in English. You and I would come up with different figures for a start. If you were doing the sort of puzzle where you have to make lots of short words out of one long one, then eat, eats, ate, eating and eaten would score you five points. But eats, eating and eaten are not headwords in the dictionary, as lexicographers don't consider them separate words, but as forms of the word 'eat'. (Ate is a headword, but only because it looks so different from its relatives, and even then you're told to see 'eat').