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

[Baker, John]

        While Arnold's concerns are valid, I would argue that it's
dangerous to ignore bogus claims that are already getting attention
elsewhere and that mocking may be the most effective strategy.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Arnold M. Zwicky
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 1:58 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: A million English words, or only 600,000? Either way, it's
a language packed with more words than you'll ever need

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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