English to reach its one millionth word

London, Jul 7: The English language is set to reach a very important landmark within the next year - its one millionth word.

A new English word is created every 98 minutes, and the current number of official words stands at 995,844. With the way things are going, experts believe that the language will cross its one millionth word mark within the year, more specifically 29 April, 2009. "English is different to most other languages in that it absorbs words like no other language in history. Language boils up from the people and we see this by the assimilation of words from 'hip hop', 'Hollywood' and 'Bollywood'," the Scotsman quoted Paul Payack, founding president of the Global Language Monitor, which came up with the date, as saying.

"Our calculations now show there is a new word created every 98 minutes. You can never have too many words, it just means there are more possible ways to communicate. We should have the one millionth word on 29 April, 2009.

However, he added that only a fraction of the words were likely to be used.

"But despite having a million words at our disposal it is unlikely that we will ever use more than just a tiny fraction of them.

"The average persons vocabulary is fewer than 14,000 words out of these million that are available. A person who is linguistically gifted would only use 70,000 words."

The newest word that was added to the language to take it one step closer to its millionth mark was 'e-Vampire', a noun describing electric equipment that consumes energy while in standby mode.

ANI