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

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:00 PM -0500 10/18/07, Gordon, Matthew J. wrote:
>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

Maybe we need to introduce a unit on the type/token distinction.

LH

>-----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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