Obviously for all us wordsmiths, the big news of last week was that The Global Language Monitor from Texas claimed that the one-millionth word had entered the English language, and this word is Web 2.0. (I did not know that you could have a space in a word, but I’m only from England where we sort of invented the language). The Global Language Monitor claims that a neologism is created every 98 minutes. This then generates a question of what is a neologism? The answer to this according to the new universal source of all wisdom, Wikipedia, is as follows: “A neologism (pronounced /ni??l?d??z?m/; from Greek neo 'new' + logos 'word') is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event. The term neologism was coined in 1803 and thus, is arguably a neologism itself.” A Google search will also bring up other answers including the following from Carnegie Mellon University, this being “a neologism is the term used to describe a word that has been made-up or invented by a speaker, which appears in a transcript of spontaneous speech dialogue. It can also be described as a word which does not appear in the dictionary of the primary spoken language, but which is also not a foreign word.”

Now with this whole massive increase in the English language I like this CMU definition, and I wonder in my long career of presentations and writing articles how many new words I may have contributed to the one million that are claimed to exist. I checked in the real source of the language, The Oxford English Dictionary for my favourite neologism, this being transcombobulate but I could find nothing. Perhaps I should have worked out a meaning for this rather than just be using it for what may seem appropriate for such a good word.

What is interesting is not that one million words have been claimed, even though many lexicographers dispute this, many stating the one million words were reached years ago, but that we are increasing the English language so rapidly. Many of the new words are ones that most of us have no understanding about. One only has to listen to the young talking to realise that they use a different version of English to the one most of us use. English has now become the universal language of communication and it is claimed that there are 1.53 billion English speakers around the world. The Oxford English Dictionary lists more than 600,000 words. Mandarin Chinese is the next most abundant language for words with around 300,000 words. In terms of the number of words in the language English dwarfs other European tongues. Spanish has 250,000 words, and French has a mere 100,000 words. The French really need to improve this. Have you ever tried to swear well in French? The best they seem to do is “double merde!” after which they resort to English four letter words. In listening to the average English speech one hears, or in seeing what is written in most popular newspapers and magazines, I would estimate that most people make do with less than 1,000 words. Now who would be using the extra 999,000 words?