AP: English Language Hits 1 Billion Words

[Tesha]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2006/04/26/international/i063924D41.DTL

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 lexi-
cographers 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."

<more>

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. One Million. Off by a factor of 1,000.

One Million. Off by a factor of 1,000.

[DRoseDARs]

6. Hmm, according to this...

http://www.answers.com/topic/billion

Meaning #1: (in Britain) the number that is represented as a one followed by 12 zeros
Synonyms: one million million, 1000000000000

Meaning #2: (in the United States) the number that is represented as a one followed by 9 zeros
Synonyms: one thousand million, 1000000000

The adjective billion has one meaning:

Meaning #1: (U.S.) denoting a quantity consisting of one thousand million items or units; (Britain) denoting a quantity consisting of one million million items or units
Synonym: a billion

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. A million million words would be off by a factor of a million.

Average vocabulary used by people is about 2,000 to 5,000 words, and people understand about 10 or 15,000.

Shakespeare had a vocabulary of 25,000 words.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. "not a collection of 1 billion different words"

Yes, they do mean "1 billion" , and it means 1,000,000,000 ("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" - source - there are 1,000,000,000 cm in 10,000 km, though that's about twice the London-New York distance - perhaps they left out "and back").

As that link explains, they mean they've got indexed examples of current English that total 1 billion words. It doesn't specify the number of distinct English words.

[Tesha]

9. No. the Corpus page definitely claims one billion (apparently, 10^9) words

No. the Corpus page definitely claims one billion (apparently, 10^9)
words. They don't mean just a contiguous string of letters, unbroken
by spaces, though; see the second Q&A below. It's apparently the
AP writer who misinterpreted what was meant. (What a surprise, ehh?)

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

The corpus reaches new heights

In Spring 2006 a milestone is reached: the corpus now
contains over 1 billion words of real 21st century English.
It is not only size that matters, though: it is the size of
the corpus coupled with the careful selection and development
of its contents which means that it is a resource unlike any
other anywhere in the world.


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!

Tesha

[Bernardo de La Paz]

11. OK, different,The Corpus replicates the Vocabulary millions of times over.

Ten or twenty years ago the vocabulary of the English language was 450,000 words.

The Corpus (or "Body") is the sum total of all the written words in English, like Shakespeare's plays and Tony Snow's posts that were scrubbed from the freeprepublic but can still be read by clicking on the "Cached" links and then looking for the highlighted "by Tony Snow" posts: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22by+tony+snow%22+site%3Afreerepublic.com&num=30&meta=site%3Dsearch

[shain from kane]

14. I read somewhere, probably Ripley's Believe It or Not, that if Adam

counted from one to one billion, at, I think, it was rate of one number per second, that he would still be counting today.

A billion is a big number.

And when we talk about a trillion, we are talking about the sum of many worker ants' production. There is no one person counting to a billion, or a trillion, dollar by dollar.

Does anyone have a calculation of the permutations and combinations of 26 letters?


From the above paragraph, "Because the corpus is a collection of texts, there are not one billion different words"

[melm00se]

31. i think

that the number is in the range of 4x10^26 (calculate 26!)

[Tesha]

32. 'Depends on the number of letters-per-word.

> Does anyone have a calculation of the permutations
> and combinations of 26 letters?

It depends on the number of letters-per-word that you want
to consider. If you'll allow words like "supercalifragil-
isticexpialidocious", then there are far too many permutations
to bother counting, even if we through in some restrictions on
combinations that are clearly implausible English words (for
example, "qqqqq").

Tesha

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. And * knows MAYBE 1000. n/t

[Monk06]

7. "And * knows MAYBE 1000." Actually the average competent....

English speaker has a vocabulary of 600 words
So Bush maybe has a vocabulary of 200.

On the other hand at the rate he is slaughtering
the English language by turning verbs into nouns
and nouns into verbs we be up to 2 Billion by the
time he's gone.

Just look what he's don't to the deficit. He's a
natural born INFLATIONIST.

Oops, I think I just created a Bushism.

[Tesha]

30. 600 words? Nonsense.

> Actually the average competent English speaker
> has a vocabulary of 600 words.

You *KNOW* that's not true. If you sat down with
a dictionary, turned to "Aardvark", and started
ticking off all the words you know, you'd have far
than 600, probably before you reached "Ear".

It may be that the average competent English speaker
selects from a more-restricted vocabulary of 600 words
when speaking colloquially, but I think you'll find
the number of words "known" to the average speaker is
north of 5,000 and often, 10,000.

(By the way, this post of mine contains 73 unique words,
so more than 12% of your proposed vocabulary.)

Tesha

[Tummler]

4. And half are euphemisms for sexual or excretory functions!

:hurts:

[shain from kane]

5. With unique usages. Remember "turd blossom"? Now conferring with his

lawyers.
What is the meaning of this phrase in the dictionary?
I don't have a clue. But, of course, I don't hang around the blueblood crowd, his base, like the fearful leader. Most people that I know don't talk like that.

[fshrink]

25. Like :"what a bush!"

[fshrink]

26. Or "go bush yourself".

[mark11727]

13. Like when I caught my finger in the door...

... I saw a million stars, and named every one of them.

:evilgrin:

[Haole Girl]

12. Then why do most 15 year olds only use one:

whatever:rofl:

[DavidDvorkin]

16. "Whatever" is an excellent addition to the language

Used the way the kids use it, I mean. You have to add the eyes looking at the ceiling, the expression of disgust and disinterest, the shrug. Adults should adopt that and use it constantly. The world would be much improved.

[One Honest Guy]

15. Beautiful!

Quantity over quality eh? Mine is bigger than yours? Tsk, tsk. Anglo superiority complex in all its glory.

I got another one for em: shamabang, which is short for: western civilization is decomposing, rotting mess, which at current rate, will not survive the 21st century in its current form.

Put that in your lexicon and smoke it.

Praise the queen and pass the tea!

[rucky]

17. Is Brazillion one of them? n/t

[AngryAmish]

37. Post of the week.

[Buns_of_Fire]

18. Deleted because both my brain and my fingers work three minutes

slower than rucky's...

[Igel]

19. What an absurd title.

The OED folk maintain a corpus. A body of texts. They're doing corpus linguistics on it. The corpus contains texts, the word count for the texts is a billion.

There are Russian corpora (and yes, they use the Latin plural), Polish corpora, Serbian ... some are huge, many are not. Some are balanced (with a range of linguistic styles represented), some only colloquial, some are only literary. Some are tagged, many are not.

Stupid editor <-- stupid title.

[Inland]

20. "Cutting edge"? I don't know about that.

English has two things that cause a multiplicity of words:

1) Because of celtic, germanic, danish, and romance influences, it has at least two words for every meaning, or similar meanings. Doctor, physician, lawyer, attorney, pork, swine. Other languages can't do crossword puzzles, because other languages have a shortage of "another word for X, five letters."

2) Because Americans and other colonies are the largest users of english, there's no arbiters of "real" words. So new vocabulary is created for new technologies, and for the fun of it. It doesn't bother anybody that a word like "cebutant" has practically no use except for a snarky advice column.

While a large vocabulary MAY provide a richness of expression, in practice, it doesn't.

[Bridget Burke]

21. A large vocabulary provides richness of expression....

To writers with skill.

("Celtic" languages had almost no influence on English. I was taught that "crag" was the only survival. Of course, other words were adapted later.)

[Odin2005]

27. Yep, English has tons of synonyms because of Latin and Norman French.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents

[Burma Jones]

22. Being English, we just appropriate any words we want

It's a British Thing, what's yours is mine....The USA has just taken over the responsibility these days......

[Retrograde]

38. English never met a vocabulary it couldn't steal

being a quasi-pigeon, English doesn't have to worry about case endings and stuff like that when it comes to, um borrowing words. And since it doesn't have the equivalent of the Academie Francais to decide what's a word and what's not, anybody can join in the fun.

And it makes some sense to borrow words already in use for things that the English weren't familiar with: "What do you call that big hopping thing with the pouch?" "Kangaroo." "Well, that's easier to say than 'big hopping thing with the pouch' - we'll call it that too"

I wonder, though, how many of these words are actually in use. IIRC, the original OED listed every word it could find that occurred in writing at least once after about 1400: I suspect the current count comes about the same way. A billion words, maybe, but who uses words like "forsooth" and "sockdologizing" these days?

I wonder if the count includes variants like gr8 (great)?

[Left Coast Lynn]

23. How many does B*sh know?

Any guesses?

[arikara]

24. "Decider" being the one billionth...

:rofl:

[Book Lover]

28. Don;t you mean

brazillionth?

[maxsolomon]

29. consider "bad"

1. bad = not good.
2. bad = very good in the michael jackson sense.

is that 2 words or one?

that's how you get to a billion.

my daily vocabulary is WAY over 600 words. i used 'bailiwick' & 'hornswoggled' today.

[slackmaster]

33. I'll bet "lolocaust" would make it 1,000,000,001

:argh:

[robcon]

34. I thi8nk Bush has added a word

"overmisunderestimated"

[AlCzervik]

35. And Bush knows about 8 of them.

[AngryAmish]

36. It is perfectly cromulent

The strength of the language enbiggens everybody.