That's SUPERSPLENDILLYICIOUS!!
Posted on 07/08/2008 5:01:38 AM PDT by Coffee200am
London: The English language is set to reach a very important landmark within the next year – its one millionth word.
A new English word is created every 98 minutes, and the current number of official words stands at 995,844.
With the way things are going, experts believe that the language will cross its one millionth word mark within the year, more specifically 29 April, 2009.
More news, analysis | More Science and Medicine news
"English is different to most other languages in that it absorbs words like no other language in history. Language boils up from the people and we see this by the assimilation of words from 'hip hop', 'Hollywood' and 'Bollywood'," the Scotsman quoted Paul Payack, founding president of the Global Language Monitor, which came up with the date, as saying.
"Our calculations now show there is a new word created every 98 minutes. You can never have too many words, it just means there are more possible ways to communicate. We should have the one millionth word on 29 April, 2009.
However, he added that only a fraction of the words were likely to be used.
"But 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 newest word that was added to the language to take it one step closer to its millionth mark was 'e-Vampire', a noun describing electric equipment that consumes energy while in standby mode.
Wouldn't "different from" be correct form?
“It’s the Moors, you idiot!”
beat me to it dammit.
FR has some of it’s own to offer . . .
magisterical
magcsterical
for bureaucratic political religious committee bound oversight bodies of larger religious denominations.
And of course a longish list of older FREEPERISMS
e.g.
FREEPER
FREEPING
FREEPATHON
etc.
Just doing our part! LOL.
You know, with a million words there ought to be a specific word for that particular form of a placename used to describe a person from that place. A “Mexican” is a person from Mexico. A “Canadian” is a person from Canada. Etc. So you are discussing a certain country, say Togo, and you want to know what to call someone from Togo. What word would complete this sentence:
“What is the (blank) for Togo?” meaning
“What is the name for a person from Togo?”
Togoid?
Togoan?
Togoite?
Lance?
I guess we’ve slipped the world the tongue.
As Steve Martin famously said - “Some people have a way with words and other people .... (long pause) ..... not have way ... I guess.”
How about “yuth”
That's SUPERSPLENDILLYICIOUS!!
Back in ‘55 when we thought we were hot because we knew 20,000 words we were informed that English has two million words.
Even before he's President, the Mighty O created "inartful"
I hope that's not an omen...W started using "misunderestimate" before he was elected to the Presidency.
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English is just a tool of cultural imperialists, and the result is the extinction of thousands of rare languages. /sarc |
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Everything costs more...
For an article about words, this one was oddly underproofed.
I think “different to” is proper British usage (remember the old saying about two countries — US and UK — divided by a common language!
When I was in grad school (English) in the 70s, we learned in a linguistics course that best estimates placed English as having 600,000 to a million words. I did have a lexicography course -- word count in a language isn't all that straightforward, e.g., do you count "nonce words," those that show up for a year or two and disappear? do you count localisms? when does a word with two or more different strands of meaning count as two or more words? when does a foreign word begin to count as a native word?
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