A million English words, or only 600,000? Either way, it's a language packed with more words than you'll ever need

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jul 8, 2008, at 7:53 PM, Dennis Baron wrote:

> There's a new post on the Web of Language:
>
> A million English words, or only 600,000?  Either way, it's a
> language packed with more words than you'll ever need
>
> Paul Payack, professional word-counter and the founder of
> YourDictionary.com, claims that someone coins an English word every
> 98 minutes...e just don’t know what they are.
>
> ... Payack also predicts that some time around April 29, 2009 – mark
> your calendars – the one millionth English word will appear...

these claims appear, not on the yourDictionary.com site (which is just
a compendium of on-line dictionaries), but on Payack's Global Language
Monitor site (Payack describes GLM as "my company"), and the claims
are based not on lexicographic research (there is  *no list* of those
hugely many English words), but on corpus searches using a secret
"algorithm" of his own devising.  (this means that there is no sense
in which Payack can be said to be a "competitor" of the OED.) the man
is a self-promoting charlatan (as Ben Zimmer, Geoff Nunberg, and
others have repeatedly pointed out in various places), and it's
dismaying to see Dennis give him still more publicity.

i grant that Dennis's piece is gently mocking, and includes some
criticism of the idea that you could count the words of English (or
any other language) -- an idea that we've been around here, with links
to discussions elsewhere, a wearying number of times. unfortunately,
taking the idea seriously enough to mock it plays into Payack's hands:
it gives him more publicity, and reinforces the mistaken idea in the
public's mind.  (refuting claims often has the paradoxical effect of
increasing people's degree of belief in those claims, especially when
the claims are bold and when people have some reason to be sympathetic
to the claims.  it's a sad thought that the effort, in writing and
teaching, that some of us have put into the topic of the number of
words for X in language L might simply have had the effect of helping
to keep the idea alive.)

arnold

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