The phone hasn't stopped ringing this week. An American
organization is claiming that the English language is just about
to get its millionth word. They've even suggested a day when
this will happen. It's the biggest load of rubbish I've heard in
years. But it's attracted a huge amount of publicity. All it
means is that the algorithm they've been using to track English
words has finally reached a million. But the English language
passed a millon words years ago. Way back in the 1980s, the OED
had well over half a million words in its collection. Webster
had around half a million. And if you made a comparison of the
two (as I did when I was writing The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
the English Language) you could see straight away that the
coverage was by no means the same. I estimated then that there
was about a third difference in coverage between the two
dictionaries, due largely to the OED's historical remit - so
from these two projects alone there was evidence of some three-
quarters of a million words in Engl