Since “findings” by the Global Language Monitor were made public a few weeks ago, a hot topic in media outlets as diverse as America’s National Public Radio, London’s Sunday Times, and China’s People’s Daily concerns the number of words currently extant in the English language. Heading up GLM, Paul J.J. Payack, a man with no professional expertise in the language (but lots of experience working at computer firms), estimates, through an algorithm he invented, that there are approximately 990,000 words in the English language and that the total will hit the one million mark by the end of this year. But this figure of one million will seem suspect, even to the greatest of word-lovers, though they may not know why. On Slate.com, Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, gives us about a dozen reasons why it should. The grey areas he identifies in counting a language’s words include homonyms, numbers, the names of chemicals and species — there are, for example, already close to a million insect species on record and more than 84 million named chemical substances — inflected forms of words (such as ran, runs, and running), compound words, non-English words commonly used by English-speakers (such as the Vietnamese noodle soup, pho), and jargon.

Writes Sheidlower: “So, where does that leave us? It’s probably possible to devise criteria that would allow us to conclude that there are about a million words in English. (The dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster goes for ‘roughly 1 million words’ in its discussion of this particular question, although elsewhere, they suggest that the figure could be many millions.) But there’s no possible way to count the actual number of words in the language, and the idea of having a running counter, as is found on GLM’s home page, is absurd.”

Elsewhere, Sheidlower expressed fears that all this talk of a million words in English may lead to the ill-founded notion of Western supremacy. Speaking to Peter Rowe, a reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Sheidlower maintained that claims concerning the number of words in the English language are “‘usually attached to some kind of statistic that tries to impart some value.’ The unspoken message, in Sheidlower’s view: ‘English has the most words, so English must be the best language.'”

Related links:
Click here for the Slate.com piece
Click here for the San Diego Union-Tribune piece