What’s a Word?
Posted on | January 21, 2010 | No Comments
by Cat Johnson
Ever wondered how many words there are in the English language? Although it’s a common question, it’s apparently one that doesn’t have a good answer as it raises another question: what counts as a word?
Sounds like a trick question right? But, according to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words, even dictionaries can’t agree on what constitutes a word. In his article How Many Words, he broke down the issue. Here are the key points:
“Take a verb like climb. The rules of English allow you to generate the forms climbs, climbed, climbable, and climbing, the nouns climb and climber, compounds such as climb-down and climbing frame, and phrasal verbs like climb on, climb over, and climb down. Are all these distinct words, or do you lump them all together under climb?”
“The entry for “set” in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to 60,000 words. The noun alone has 47 separate senses listed. Are all these distinct words?”
“Do you count all the regional variations of English? Or slang? Dialect? Family or private language? Proper names and the names of places? And what about abbreviations? The biggest dictionary of them has more than 400,000 entries — do you count them all as words?”
“What about informal and formal names for living things? The wood louse is known in Britain by many local names — tiggy-hog, cheeselog, pill bug, chiggy pig, and rolypoly among others. Are these all to be counted as separate words?”
“To take a more specialist example, is Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, the formal name for bread yeast, to be counted as a word (or perhaps two)? If you say yes, you’ve got to add another couple of million such names to the English-language word count.”
“What about medical terms, such as syncytiotrophoblastic or holoprosencephaly that few of us ever encounter?”
“The problem doesn’t stop there. English speakers not only know words, they know word-forming elements, such as the ending -phobia for some irrational fear. A journalist rushing to meet a deadline might take a word he knows, like Serb, and tack on the ending to make Serbophobia. He’s just added a word to the language. If nobody ever uses it again, can we legitimately count it?”
It seems that language is a creature that doesn’t want to stand still for a word count. It’s dynamic, changing nature is what keeps it alive. Really, it would be nearly impossible to count the words that have emerged just in the last ten years. Makes me wonder what the next ten will bring.
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