The Million Word Mystery

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The media has been abuzz for the past few weeks over the approaching inclusion of the millionth word into the English language. The Global Language Monitor, an organization in Austin, Texas, predicted that the great event would happen at precisely 10:22 a.m. on June 10.

 

This milestone would mark the dominance of English over every other spoken language. At that point, its vocabulary would be twice as large as Cantonese (the second densest language), and would dwarf French’s 100,000- and Spanish’s 250,000-word lexicons. What would this millionth word be? Some say it will be "defriend". Others are certain it will be "noob.”

"It doesn't get more exciting than this," trumpeted the Mirror, whose coverage has been far from alone. The Economist, Christian Science Monitor, the Telegraph, NPR, and others have tracked the story. The date has even appeared in FLYP. Most of these media outlets have been rightly skeptical of the ticker, but the media fanfare continues.

But, to coin a phrase, what's in a word? In fact, when you get right down to it, what is a word? Do write and writes count as two? English includes a lot of borrowed words, like beret from the French. Do those count? And when does a word becomes “official.” The Global Language Monitor has decided that for a word to count, it has to be understood by at least 100 million people and show up at least 25,000 times in the mass media, on social networking sites and elsewhere. (Surely by this calculation, those pulling for "noob” will be disappointed.)

At the current pace, a new word is entered into the English language “officially” every 98 minutes, which is how the June 10 prediction was calculated. But then why, through independent analyses, has it been shown that the growth of English words has been slowing?

Benjamin Zimmer, a writer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log blog, has pointed out that the whole Million Word March might just be a “self-aggrandizing scam” put together by the Global Language Monitor’s leader, Paul J.J. Payack. The milestone has been set at numerous dates from 2006 on; the last one was April 29, 2009. When the counter kept going—without reaching one million—Payack just adjusted the date to coincide with the delayed publication of his book, A Million Words and Counting. (Or did his pub date drive the counter this time?)

The statistics, and the dubious circumstances under which Payack counts words, has been seriously debunked by writers like Slate’s Jesse Sheidlower. He wrote that the Global Language Monitor “has done a remarkable job suckering even the respectable press into believing that we're on the verge of adding the millionth word to English—at which point we'll presumably see another flurry of articles about GLM. Even so, its claim is a bogus one.”

Maybe in GLM's honor, the millionth word should be boof.