Millionth English Word Or Just "Nonsense?"

(CBS)  Set your clocks. The English language is weeks away from expanding its lexicon to one million words.

So says Paul Payack, chief of the Website Global Language Monitor and author of A Million Words And Counting. The self-style language expert from Texas predicts the millionth entry will come on June 10, at 10:22 a.m., according to a report in the Houston Chronicle Monday.

According to Payack, a new English word is created every 98 minutes and those new entries are fed into his site where they are checked for acceptance. (Words must be published 25,000 times before being candidates.)

But that prediction has come under fire from linguists who say Payack is more interested in generating publicity than in adding to linguistic scholarship.

"He made it all up in his head," said Robert Beard, a linguist who worked with Payack on an Internet dictionary told the Houston Chronicle "He's a great marketer, but he's a classics major. He knows nothing about linguistics."

"I think it's pure fraud," said Geoffrey Nunberg, a University of California-Berkeley linguistics professor. "It's not bad science. It's nonsense."

Experts say it's impossible to calculate the number of words in the English language, which is complicated by the classification of compound words, verb forms and obsolete terms.

But don't tell that to Payack.

"We believe words can be counted if you define them in the right way," he told the Chronicle. "You can count them like anything else in science. You can count how many atoms there are in the ocean."

[snoitan]

It's all just a way for him to sell books:

http://webtrends.about.com/b/2009/06/10/web-20-arbitrarily-proclaimed-one-millionth-word.htm

By his original reckoning, we should have passed the one millionth mark in December of 2008.

[cmnsense]

What defines publishing? Is he saying all we have to do to make DUMSIT a word it to publish it 25,000 times on the internet?
Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, Dumsit, .....

[Dgunner]

I have to admit that the fact that a word adopted from the slang terms of a publicaly declared drug user , abuser of woman, scoffer of law and a person who profited from his life expeierences as a defiant citizen surprises me and baffles me that the congressional pane on english language allowed it to written in. The word is something like FASIZZLE or something like that. The man snoop dog.Now there is a mentor for our young to look up to and a prime example that you be anythimg you want to be in America including a inventor of words and at the same time promote drug use human abuse and felon . The country will love you and poor buckets of money in your lap.

[rational_1]

I'm banking "stupidify" is already in the list - as in "I helped stupidify the world by wasting my time in trying to find the millionth word in the English language".

[toldyouso29]

?We believe words can be counted if you define them in the right way,? he told the Chronicle. ?You can count them like anything else in science. You can count how many atoms there are in the ocean.?

]Sure you CAN'T. There is no possible way to count all the atoms in the ocean, because as living things produce and are composed of atoms, or organic or inorganic matter falls into the ocean, or atoms evaporate in moisture...there is no way to count anything when one cannot control or make that number stable or finite.

In other words, everything is composed of atoms, when fish lay eggs, they can release over 100 thousand or more for fertilization. Each egg is made up of atoms with fertilized eggs made of even more--no one ever knows how many eggs are produced or grow up to make more fish--and if you do not have a KNOWN number for every single piece of matter in the ocean, and a definitive number for every single piece of matter leaving the ocean or being transformed--then there is NO WAY you can count all of the atoms in the ocean--at best--any scientist who claims the number is lying--at worse--they are crazy.

[Snowhare]

Somewhat of a linguist myself, I would have guessed that there are more than a million words there already.
However, I have no idea how the guy gets to a new word every 98 minutes...
And anyway, what does the amount of words say about a language?

I go with the skirtlifter's "idiotness"!