English Language Hits 1 Billion Words

By SUEVON LEE, Associated Press Writer

A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as "podcast" and "celebutante" to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday.

Drawing on sources such as weblogs, chatrooms, newspapers, magazines and fiction, the Oxford English Corpus spots emerging trends in language usage to help guide lexicographers when composing the most recent editions of dictionaries.

The press publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, considered the most comprehensive dictionary of the language, which in its most recent August 2005 edition added words such as "supersize," "wiki" and "retail politics" to its pages.

Oxford University Press lexicographer Catherine Soanes said the database is not a collection of 1 billion different words, but of sentences and other examples of the usage and spelling.

"The corpus is purely 21st century English," said Judy Pearsall, publishing manager of English dictionaries. "You're looking at current English and seeing what's happening right now. That's language at the cutting edge."

As hybrid words such as "geek-chic," "inner-child" or "gabfest" increase in usage, Pearsall said part of the research project's goal is to identify words that have lasting power.

"English gets really creative, really fun. What we're putting in dictionaries is words that will stick around," she said.

Launched in January 2000, the Oxford English Corpus is part of the world's largest-funded language research project, costing $90,000-$107,000 per year.

It has helped identify how the spellings of common phrases have changed, such as "fazed by" to "phased by" or "free rein" to "free reign."

"Buck naked" increasingly has evolved to "butt naked."

The corpus collects evidence from all the places where English is spoken, whether from North America, Britain, the Caribbean, Australia or India, to reflect the most current and common usage of the English language.

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On the Net:

Oxford Corpus, http://www.askoxford.com/oec

The author needs to think for just a second or two about what she's saying. She is off by three orders of magnitude. It's a million, not a billion.

million, billion, what country are we talking?

It's a million whether you are in France or Australia. 1 followed by 6 zeroes. Ten to the 6th power.

Billion is a different story. Some parts of the world define it incorrectly.

But:

One billion words?

If all the words in the Oxford English Corpus were laid out end to end (measuring on average 1cm), the total would stretch from London to New York, around 10,000 km. Because the corpus is a collection of texts, there are not one billion different words: the humble word 'the', the commonest in the written language, accounts for 50 million of all the words in the corpus!


http://www.askoxford.com/oec/mainpage/?view=uk

I sit corrected.

Re: the Oxford English Dictionary:

Isn't there a 3rd edition about to come out soon?

>Isn't there a 3rd edition about to come out soon?

not in the traditional (OED2) sense. the new edition is an ongoing, online effort.

Quote:

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I sit corrected.

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Well, not necessarily, TEd. I think you're much closer to the mark on actual number of individual words. The story is misleading (which is why I wrote "sort of" in the subject line). As much as I respect the folks at Oxford, this looks to me like a cheap effort at publicity. I still haven't figured out *what exactly the Corpus is counting.