“Web 2.0″ Becomes The Millionth Word To Be Accepted Into The English Language

On Wednesday, June 10 2009 at 5:22am ET, the Internet made real history. It wasn’t an Internet expert developing and launching a Website answering all of the world’s questions, it wasn’t a new search engine going live that will “revolutionize the Internet” and it wasn’t the invent of a new programming language - in fact, it was much more simple. In the early hours of June 10, Web 2.0 was officially entered into the English Language - as the millionth word ever to do so.

It is arguable that English is the world’s most complex and certainly the world’s largest language, but nobody expected this famous Internet term to remain in the minds of English professors and dictionary editors for years to come. For all an average of fourteen words are added to the English dictionary everyday, it is incredible to think that a word used by millions of technology enthusiasts around the world would result in being the millionth entry into one of the world’s widest spoken languages.

Although some claim that we can never be sure exactly how many words are in the English language, research and work by founders of a project setup to analyze English means that we can have a pretty good idea how many words we actually have in our dictionaries. Others are praising the English language on the basis that it accepts coined terms, where other languages would usually search for a more sensible or an alternative word to describe the new phrase.

However, if the research into English is correct and accurate, then it is placed far ahead of the world’s widest spoken language, Chinese Mandarin, which only has 450,000 words according to Paul J.J. Payack, the president of the Global Language Monitor. Although the Oxford English Dictionary has an average of 600,000 entries, it is said that this by no means relates to the actual number recorded in the language.

I, however, truly believe that it is a credit to the technological world that a word coined by people who share our interests, and a word that we use in our everyday geeky vocabulary, can actually turn out to make real history in our language. Leave your thoughts and feelings in a comment.