Web 2.0 declared "millionth English word"
A US-based web monitoring firm has declared that the millionth English word is Web 2.0. Dictionary makers cry foul.
The firm searches the web for newly coined terms, and once a word or phrase has been used at least 25,000 times, it is recognised as a word.
GLM said Web 2.0 beat competition from terms such as Jai ho, n00b and slumdog to earn its title, but traditional dictionary makers have cast doubt over the claim and the firm's methodology.
The Texas-based company makes its money by telling organisations how often they are mentioned in new media, such as the Internet, and also tracks trends for new words and expressions.
Dictionary makers have much tighter criteria for recognising new words - they have to be used for a certain amount of time, for example.
Lexicographers claim that the exact size of the English vocabulary is "impossible to quantify" but said if every technical term or specialist word was accepted then we'd already be well beyond one million words. If specialist slang is restricted, its suggested that there are only approximately 750,000 words in the English language.
When you consider a fluent speaker will only use approximately 20 to 40,000 words and you can get by with just a few thousand, the size of the English vocabulary is a little immaterial anyway
Discuss in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyImo, it's not a new word, more an existing word with a couple of digits and some errant punctuation that acts as an unnecessary suffix.
Edit: beaten to the punch by mr pook.
This - if anything it's a phrase, not a word.
Regardless of whether Web 2.0 is a word (it isn't), but surely it's been around for years, it's hardly a new word.
Now n00b, on the other hand, that's lanugage in motion!
and they cant even spell propperly.
Green house... two words
Car seventeen... two words
Web 2.0... two words... or, one word and some numbers...
If you say so...
gogo
A word is a single element in speech or writing, and is not necessarily restricted to a single group of letters (or numerals). If you feel somehow slighted that the big, bad USA is telling you what are and are not words, then perhaps we can consult the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is one informational page from August, 2004, listing several new words in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:
New words in August 2004
I draw your attention to the following example:
There are other examples, but the point is that dictionaries often add new words that may or may not be single groups of letters; rather, they sometimes include compound words, hyphenated words, phrases, or even new uses for existing words.
Word. Peace out.
-monkey
I can kind of imagine it being in the ledendary Dr.Johnsons dictionary (as seen in Blackadder) listed like this;
"Web 2.0: Not a word."
The Semantic Web is what Tim Berners Lee believes to be the future of the web.
Web 2.0: noun, a synonym for world wide web, used primarily in order to make companies pay ridiculous amounts of money for new websites which a) they don't need and b) are generally harder to navigate and less helpful than their old website.
Setting aside the fact that our use of the internet evolves over time and doesn't make quantum leaps, the use of 'Web 2.0' is analogous to saying that when petrol cars are no longer the norm, we'll be driving whatever replaces them on Motorways 2.0. The internet is a means of sharing information; that the nature of that information has changed and our use of the system has changed does not change the system itself.
As a consequence, we now have infinte English words. Yay.