Apparently the English language does... and according to the Global Language Monitor it will achieve its ambition on 29th April 2009, for that is when this group of "linguistic experts" predict that the one-millionth word will be coined in our language.
This article in today's edition of the Scotsman tells us that at the last count there were 995,844 words in the English language and that the GLM have calculated that "a new word is created every 98 minutes". Now, leaving aside for the moment the obvious question 'How exactly have they calculated this?' (and, if you want to be cynical, 'Why?'), the GLM's observations do raise some interesting points if we think back to the subject of last week's Custard Creams and Muffin Tops post. You'll remember that this post looked at the list of new words that had been added to the latest edition of the Concise OED, noting that "it's always interesting to see which words the dictionary makers deem worthy of an entry in their latest edition". Bearing in mind that this new edition of the Concise OED updates the edition published two years previously, using the GLM's figure of one new word every 98 minutes, a grand total of 10,726 (and a half) new words will have entered our language in the time between the publication of these two editions (and yes, I really did spend my time working that out...). Surely this begs the question why only a handful of these new words have made it into the dictionary?
Perhaps this points to the transience of many of the new words and phrases that enter our language, and/or to the fact that the use of many coinages is restricted to relatively small groups and specific contexts. Some of the comments that have been posted in response to the Scotsman article have some interesting things to say about this.
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