Global Language Monitor - Counting English Words

Counting English Words

GLM announced the 1,000,000th English word on June 10, 2009. This controversial exercise was widely covered in the global media. The count itself was widely criticized by a number of prominent members of the linguistic community, including Geoffrey Nunberg, and Jesse Sheidlower and Benjamin Zimmer. on the grounds that since there is no generally accepted definition of a word, there can never be a definitive count. However, in December 2010 a joint Harvard-Google study found the language to contain 1,022,000 words and was expanding at the rate of 8,500 words per year. The difference between the Harvard-Google estimate and that of the Global Language Monitor is about thirteen thousandth of one percent.

The finalists, which met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution and depth of citations, were:

1. Web 2.0. 2. Jai Ho! 3. N00b. 4. Slumdog. 5. Cloud computing. 6. Carbon Neutral. 7. Slow Food. 8. Octomom. 9. Greenwashing. 10. Sexting. 11. Shovel ready. 12. Defriend. 13. Chengguan. 14. Recessionista. 15. Zombie Banks.

Critics noted that the target date had been changed a number of times from late in 2006 to early in 2009. It was also criticized on grounds that a count is impossible because "word" is not a scientifically valid concept. Google addressed this situation by counting the words in the 15 million scanned texts in their corpus. Global Language Monitor states the general criteria for inclusion on its site, maintaining that it is simply updating the established criteria for printed dictionaries beginning with the works of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster.

The New York Times quoted Payack as saying that the PQI is "an algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet in relation to frequency, context and appearance in global media. It is a weighted index that takes into account year-to-year increases and acceleration in the last several months". In general terms, GLM describes its Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), used to run its analytics on global language trends and, as a weighted index, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity, using frequency data on words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, and throughout the blogosphere, as well as in proprietary databases (Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, etc.). It can also create "signals" that can be used in a variety of applications.