English Language Hits 1 Billion Words

[TexasStooge]

By SUEVON LEE, Associated Press Writer

LONDON, England (AP) - A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as "podcast" and "celebutante" to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday.

Drawing on sources such as weblogs, chatrooms, newspapers, magazines and fiction, the Oxford English Corpus spots emerging trends in language usage to help guide lexicographers when composing the most recent editions of dictionaries.

The press publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, considered the most comprehensive dictionary of the language, which in its most recent August 2005 edition added words such as "supersize," "wiki" and "retail politics" to its pages.

Oxford University Press lexicographer Catherine Soanes said the database is not a collection of 1 billion different words, but of sentences and other examples of the usage and spelling.

"The corpus is purely 21st century English," said Judy Pearsall, publishing manager of English dictionaries. "You're looking at current English and seeing what's happening right now. That's language at the cutting edge."

As hybrid words such as "geek-chic," "inner-child" or "gabfest" increase in usage, Pearsall said part of the research project's goal is to identify words that have lasting power.

"English gets really creative, really fun. What we're putting in dictionaries is words that will stick around," she said.

Launched in January 2000, the Oxford English Corpus is part of the world's largest-funded language research project, costing $90,000-$107,000 per year.

It has helped identify how the spellings of common phrases have changed, such as "fazed by" to "phased by" or "free rein" to "free reign."

"Buck naked" increasingly has evolved to "butt naked."

The corpus collects evidence from all the places where English is spoken, whether from North America, Britain, the Caribbean, Australia or India, to reflect the most current and common usage of the English language.
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On the Net: Oxford Corpus

[coriolis]

It has helped identify how the spellings of common phrases have changed, such as "fazed by" to "phased by" or "free rein" to "free reign."

"Buck naked" increasingly has evolved to "butt naked."


I thought that these were just corrupted spellings and pronounciations by individuals that didn't know any better. I guess not.

[kevin]

Usage is the only thing that matters. Language changes over time, and I'm sure its a good thing. English is a very large language right now, spreading out across the entire world. There are hundreds of dialects. Because rules will be broken, eventually english will fragment into regional languages. On account of the written nature of our language this will take much longer.

But language purists should know the only languages which are static are dead languages, but even there spelling is something of whatever you wish at least with the one I know best, latin.

[coriolis]

Well thats jest grate!

[James]

It's interesting to consider that we probably don't use a great proportion of those words at all in our speech, we are perfectly able to get by on a relatively limited number of words that can express such a huge amount of things. Weird to think of how many millions there must be that you've never even heard of.

[kevin]

English dominates science, so there are hundreds of thousands of scientific technical jargon that gets included. Also there aren't 1 billion words, despite what the title says. There are 1 billion words among phrases and sentences (according to the article). They're basically including idiomatic phrases.

Well thats jest grate!

Indeed!

Now, I wasn't advocating that standards shouldn't be dropped for the written language, because mutual intelligibility is useful in business, government, and public exchange, but spelling will change because people will think of words in new ways and they will pronounce them differently. If you don't change your spelling, you end up with something godawful and approaching French.

[CentralFlGal]

I think back to the days when teachers used to tell students "'Ain't' ain't in the dictionary."

[JonathanBelles]

my 60 year old teacher still tells me that but it is in the dictionary

[coriolis]

mutual intelligibility

Ya, I understand what you're saying, but that would make for good governmental doubletalk.

"The secretary cited a breakdown in mutual intelligibility between the departments as the cause for the ineffective response to the situation."

"We all know that mutual intelligibility is crucial to the cooperative mission that our organizations share."

[kevin]

Yes, I should work for the government. I could help them become even more obtuse.