DailyDirt: Making Up Words

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The English language creates new words all the time and steals words from other languages to bulk up its vocabulary. Maybe it's not fair to other languages, but then the consequences are that English grammar is highly irregular and correct spellings sometimes require knowledge of the word origins. Here are just a few interesting tidbits on creating new words.

• The usage of "OMG" apparently dates back as far as 1917 -- when Lord John Fisher used it in a letter to Winston Churchill. However, the Oxford English Dictionary only added OMG to its lexicon in 2011. [url]
• How many words exist in the English language? Unabridged dictionaries have hundreds of thousands of entries, but scientific estimates put it closer to a million. A 2011 Culturonomics paper suggests the English language is growing at a rate of about 8,500 new words per year, but that rate is actually slowing down. [url]
• Lingodroids are creating new words that humans might be able to use. Perhaps fittingly, these bots are generating a whole lot of new 4-letter words. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: culturonomics, english, language, lingodroids, omg, words