The English language is very popular across the globe. It is spoken by more than 1.35 billion people and the English language is about to pass an important milestone: the creation of the 1 millionth word.

The current number of official words in the English language is 995,844. Linguistic experts have calculated that a new English word is created every 98 minutes would you believe it – putting the arrival of the 1 millionth word at around 29 April 2009. In fact, the latest addition to the English language was “e-Vampire”, a noun describing electrical equipment that consumes energy whilst in standby mode.

The group of experts who have worked all of this out come from a company called the Global Language Monitor. Global Language Monitor is comprised of leading academics, wordsmiths, bibliophiles and analysts who spend everyday looking at trends in word usage, as well as the origins of these words and their wider cultural impacts. Paul Payack, a founder of Global Language Monitor, had this to say on the subject:

“English is different to most other languages in that it absorbs words like no other language in history. Language boils up from the people and we see this by the assimilation of words from ‘hip hop’, ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Bollywood’.

“Our calculations now show there is a new word created every 98 minutes. You can never have too many words, it just means there are more possible ways to communicate. We should have the one millionth word on 29 April, 2009.

“But despite having a million words at our disposal it is unlikely that we will ever use more than just a tiny fraction of them. The average person’s vocabulary is fewer than 14,000 words out of these million that are available. A person who is linguistically gifted would only use 70,000 words.”

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