English Language Celebrates One-Millionth Word! WHAT IS IT??

About a month ago, I reported – and by “reported” I mean hijacked someone else’s reporting and made stupid comments at it – that today English would get its millionth word.  The estimate at the time was that we’d see it at 10:22 a.m GMT.

And indeed, at about 5:22 a.m. EST/10:22 a.m. GMT, the Global Language Monitor declared the one-millionth word in the English language.  Is it “n00b”?  ”Retweet”?  ”Octomom”?  Drumroll please…  The winner… for the English language’s one-millionth word… is…  

“Web 2.0″!

Which is really more like two words, one of which is made of numbers!  It means, “the next generation of World Wide Web products and services” or “the second, more social generation of the internet.”

In these times of uncertainty when you don’t know if a woman is a man or if Spencer Pratt is acting or real or if I am a blogger or just a small cat jumping on a laptop keyboard, it is appropriate that our millionth word can mean anything or nothing at all.

The words that blew their loads just moments too soon (e.g. places 999,999; 999,998; etc.) were Jai Ho!, n00b, slumdog, cloud computing, carbon neutral, slow food, Octomom, greenwashing, sexting, shovel ready, and defriend.  The 1,000,001st word is “financial tsunami.”

The GLM has been using a special math formula to decide when a word becomes a Word:

Each word was analyzed to determine which depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as number of appearances in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and social media (such as Twitter and YouTube). The Word with the highest PQI score was deemed the 1,000,000th English language word. The Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) is used to track and analyze word usage.

The word must receive at least 25,000 mentions – citations – as well as meet these other criteria.

But there are critics.  Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary said,

“This is stuff that you just can’t count.  No one can count it, and to pretend that you can is totally disingenuous. It simply can’t be done.”

And the president of the Linguistic Society of America added,

Thomason called the million-word count a “sexy idea” that is “all hype and no substance.”

Let me note that the Oxford only has 600,000 entries and the Linguistic Society is not even a dictionary at all, so it sounds like someone has insecurity about the words equivalent of a small penis.

Source: CNN, Global Language Monitor.