{"id":272,"date":"2009-07-12T11:34:42","date_gmt":"2009-07-12T11:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=272"},"modified":"2009-06-30T14:28:53","modified_gmt":"2009-06-30T14:28:53","slug":"a-million-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/12\/a-million-words\/","title":{"rendered":"A million words?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/word-count.jpg\" alt=\"Word count\" title=\"Word count\" width=\"240\" height=\"160\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-274\" \/>That is, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.languagemonitor.com\/\">Global Language Monitor<\/a>, the amount we have now surpassed for the English language.<\/p>\n<p>The one millionth word was <em>Web 2.0. <\/em>, which isn\u2019t actually a word, but a phrase containing a noun. Look a little further and you\u2019ll find that this million includes both words and phrases. Which makes <em>financial tsunami <\/em>more acceptable as their 1,000,001st \u2018word\u2019 I suppose.<\/p>\n<p>The former editor-in-chief of the Britannica encyclopaedia is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.britannica.com\/blogs\/2009\/06\/a-million-words-or-whatever-is-too-many\/\">unimpressed<\/a> with this count, as are the linguists over at <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1497\">Language Log<\/a>. And as the OED <a href=\"http:\/\/www.askoxford.com\/asktheexperts\/faq\/aboutenglish\/numberwords\">points out<\/a>, there is no accurate way to count how many words there are in a language. <\/p>\n<p>So, what\u2019s the point of the count? Well, I think the fact it draws attention to the complexity and ever-changing face of the English language is fantastic. It\u2019s prompted many journalists to write articles about the language, and perhaps exposes people to new words. I, for one, would never have known of the existence of the word <em>quendy-trendy<\/em> (apparently British youth slang) if it weren\u2019t for the Monitor. <em>Thanks guys<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That is, according to the Global Language Monitor, the amount we have now surpassed for the English language. The one millionth word was Web 2.0. , which isn\u2019t actually a word, but a phrase containing a noun. Look a little further and you\u2019ll find that this million includes both words and phrases. Which makes financial [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16,44],"tags":[46,126,51,125,124,57],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-technology","category-words","tag-dictionary","tag-encyclopaedia","tag-language","tag-noun","tag-phrases","tag-slang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}