‘Millionth English word’ declared
A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services.
A U.S.-based language monitoring group Global Language Monitor (GLM) searches for new words on the web, once a word has been used 25,000 times on social networking and other sites, GLM declares it be a new word. GLM said “Web 2.0 appeared over 25,000 times in searches and was widely accepted, making it the legitimate, one millionth word.” Web 2.0 beat out the terms Jai ho, N00b and slumdog to take away the crown.
The terms Jai ho and slumdog came got their existance from the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire, about India’s slum dwellers.
But N00b comes from the gaming community, the company said, explaining that it is used as a disparaging term to describe a neophyte in a particular game.
Many disclaimers cast doubts about the words and the methods used.
“I think it’s pure fraud … It’s not bad science. It’s nonsense,” Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor in the University of California at Berkeley, told us.
but Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, ignores off the criticism saying that his methods were totally based on facts and was technically sound.
He calculated that about 14 new English words are created daily and said that five of them make it up to the million word’s list. This shows how English is changing along with current social trends.
The list also included “cloud computing”, meaning services delivered via the cloud or Internet, “carbon neutral”, a widely used term in the climate change debate.
But with 1.5 billion people speaking some version of English, it is small wonder it is the fastest growing language in the world, our correspondent adds.
- Vikram 
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