English is about to get its one millionth word! That’s right, by 29th April, 2009, with the 4,156 more words coined, the English language is going to have exactly one million words; no more, no less. Well, that’s what a company called the Global Language Monitor (or more precisely, the algorithm that they’re running) claims, despite their lexical authority being based on their running a website they call yourDictioanry.com.

Never mind that actually that trying to count words to such a high accuracy is just a little bit ridiculous: how exactly do you separate inflections, homonyms, compounds, variant spellings, and different senses of the word? The answer is, you can’t: words are like animal species, with fuzzy boundaries that cannot easily be drawn (and especially not automatically by a computer algorithm).

This is why estimates for the number of living species can vary between two to one hundred million without anybody being necessarily wrong – it depends on how you count, and whichever way you choose is always going to be at least partly arbitrary. And this is why this story has the same whiff of nonsensical PR bullshit as that given off when chocolate companies fund research which claims chocolate makes you thinner: there’s numbers involved, but everybody has forgotten to check whether they actually mean anything. It makes you wonder if there’s anything they’re trying to sell.

But these counter-arguments have already been made by better writers than myself. What’s more, they did so in early 2006, the last time these sort of stats did the rounds, and when the estimate for English to hit (exactly, remember!) one million words was for November of that year. Three years slippage in the estimate? For an exercise so precise, I wonder how they lost count.