National Dictionary Day on ABC World News (must-see!)

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

He was referring to the size of the corpus:

"Because the corpus is a collection of texts, there are not two billion different words: the humble word 'the', the commonest in the written language, accounts for almost 100 million of all the words in the corpus!"
http://www.askoxford.com/oec/mainpage/?view=uk

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Tom Zurinskas
Sent: Thu 10/18/2007 8:56 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: National Dictionary Day on ABC World News (must-see!)
 
So Ben, does English have 1 billion or 2 billion words?  And what does "word" mean?
Say 100 words with definitions would fit on a page, then it would take 10,000 pages to list 1 billion.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
See truespel.com - and the 4 truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at authorhouse.com.




> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:23:48 -0400
> From: bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
> Subject: Re: National Dictionary Day on ABC World News (must-see!)
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
> Subject: Re: National Dictionary Day on ABC World News (must-see!)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 10/17/07, Tom Zurinskas  wrote:
>>
>>> From: bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
>>>
>>> On 10/17/07, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Good job, Ben. Is it 2 billion words in English? I thought I read somewhere 1
>>>> billion.
>>>
>>> I was talking about the two billion words in the Oxford English Corpus
>>> (which was only discussed obliquely in the snippets of the interview
>>> that aired). More here:
>>>
>>> http://www.askoxford.com/oec/
>>
>> I found nothing at the site edress you gave. Too general.
>
> If you click through to the links on that page, you'll find plenty of
> specific information. I also frequently write about the Corpus on
> OUPblog:
>
> http://blog.oup.com/category/reference/a_to_zimmer/
>
>> Regarding the number of words, I found this below. Turns out the 1 billion is overstated
>> as it includes phrases. See
>>
>> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/26/ap/strange/mainD8H7NGDG0.shtml
>>
>> English Language Hits 1 Billion Words
>
> That was a laughably bad headline that I wrote about on Language Log
> even before I began my OUP affiliation:
>
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003073.html
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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