English nearing 1,000,000 words?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Feb 20, 2008, at 7:20 AM, i wrote:

>
> On Feb 20, 2008, at 6:25 AM, Barbara Need wrote:
>
>> On the front page of today's Chicago Tribune is an article about Paul
>> Payack's (Global Language Monitor) "calculation" that English will
>> soon have 1,000,000 words. Here is the link to the on-line version:
>> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-
>> million_words_swansonfeb20,1,1211245.story. The author contacted
>> Allan Metcalf and Jesse Sheidlower (hyphenated in the paper version
>> between the i and the d!). My first response was, but what
>> constitutes a word!
>
> we've been writing about Payack on Language Log for years:
> prominently in
>  #2809, 3012, 3015, 3871, 3986, 4009, and 4189

Geoff Pullum on the Chicago Tribune story:

  GP, 2/21/08: Payackarama:
  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005402.html




>
>
> (to get the actual link, plug the number above for X in:
>  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/X.html )
>
> several of these discuss the word-counting problem and/or have
> pointers to such discussions.
>
> Payack was a finalist in the LLog competition for the Becky, the
> "prestigious Goropius Becanus Prize, awarded to people or
> organizations who have made outstanding contributions to linguistic
> misinformation" (see #3998).
>
> arnold

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