The English language now has one million words

No, no, no, no, NO!!

Sorry, i’m a linguist–this is a professional issue.

The English language, nor any other language, has a certain number of words—and to report something like “everyone agrees that English contains more words than any other language on the planet and is growing rapidly each year” is to report absolute nonsense.

In living languages, words are being created and abandoned all the time (just a couple days ago i had the need to come up with “noneffervescencingness”, a word that i suspect was created and abandoned in the same breath), so coming up with a specific number of words in living languages is hopeless.

Similarly, dictionaries do a really bad job of recording what the words are in a language. What about a word like the pronoun yo which is in active use to mean ’s/he’ (that is, it’s a naturally occurring non-gendered third-person singular pronoun applied to animate entities), which appears in no printed dictionaries but is clearly a part of Baltimorean English? What about a word like welkin, which appears in lots of dictionaries and still occurs in performances of Shakespeare, but pretty much nowhere else?

Not to mention that even what’s generally thought to be the most comprehensive published dictionary of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, only has 650,000 (not 600,000) headwords, many tens of thousands of which are even more archaic than welkin. (If the person who started the “one million words” falsehood was talking about meanings, the number’s even more off—the OED has many, many millions of meanings for those words.)

(Even in ostensibly dead languages, words are sometimes still created—Latin has a word for ‘airplane’, thanks to the editors of L’Osservatore—and in any event you have the problem of not knowing about words that people used but were never written down or otherwise recorded.)

English also isn’t nearly as pervasive as a lot of English speakers like to think. If you added up all the native and non-native speakers of English, even the ones who can only ask how to find the washroom but might not be able to understand the answer, that number of speakers is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people who speak Mandarin as their native language, not even counting non-native speakers.

Maybe we should credit Confucius?

(And yeah, this was a bit of a rant. Sorry. I’ll be posting this on the blog you linked it from, but i wanted to post it here, too, since i’m a regular reader of this blog.)