{"id":1249,"date":"2008-12-19T16:19:36","date_gmt":"2008-12-19T15:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1249"},"modified":"2008-12-19T16:19:36","modified_gmt":"2008-12-19T15:19:36","slug":"how-many-words-in-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1249","title":{"rendered":"How many words in English?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m fascinated by the English language &#8211; partly because it&#8217;s the only one I speak and partly because so many other people around the world speak it. Two books that I&#8217;ve enjoyed reading are &#8220;English As A Global Language&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nfbooks.html#English\">here<\/a>] and &#8220;Mother Tongue&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nfbooks.html#MotherTongue\">here<\/a>].<br \/>\nAccording to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Secret-Life-Words-English-Became\/dp\/0719564549\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#038;s=books&#038;qid=1229703547&#038;sr=1-1\">&#8220;The Secret Life Of Words&#8221;<\/a> by Henry Hitchings, &#8220;English has existed for only 1,500 years&#8221; and &#8220;A thousand years ago, there were about 50,00 English words: today, according to whose estimate you accept, there are 700,000, 1 million or even double that number&#8221;.<br \/>\nNow I&#8217;ve been reading &#8220;The Economist&#8221; publication &#8220;The World In 2009&#8221; and this has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/theworldin\/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12494445&#038;d=2009\">a leader<\/a> which refers to the claim of an organisation called the Global Language Monitor that the number of words in English will pass the one million mark on 29 April 2009.<br \/>\nWhichever way you look at it, the English language has a huge vocabulary &#8211; probably the largest of any language &#8211; and, even after 60 years, I continue to learn new words all the trime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m fascinated by the English language &#8211; partly because it&#8217;s the only one I speak and partly because so many other people around the world speak it. Two books that I&#8217;ve enjoyed reading are &#8220;English As A Global Language&#8221; [my review here] and &#8220;Mother Tongue&#8221; [my review here]. According to &#8220;The Secret Life Of Words&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}