'Web 2.0' is one millionth English word

Thursday, June 18, 2009

The buzzword that heralded the new age of social networking on the internet, Web 2.0, has been crowned the one millionth English word by a US-based language monitoring group.

The Texas-based Global Language Monitor (GLM) acknowledges new words once they have been used 25,000 times on media and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. It predicts that a new English-language word is created every 98 minutes.
Not that this has impressed experts around the world, with Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, telling journalists: "I think it's pure fraud ... It's not bad science. It's nonsense."
It is unlikely that many of us will ever use all of the million English words at our disposal. Even the most linguistically gifted person is only likely to use 70,000, according to GLM.
Some of the words recently added to the English lexicon may be unknown to most of us too - unless you know what 'flash mob', 'a herbert' or 'shoulder-surfing' mean.