The cross-cultural communications guru and celebrated author, Richard D Lewis, wrote in his blog recently: ‘…Not satisfied with its twin sources of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman French, English has, over the centuries, ruthlessly mugged languages ranging from Sanskrit, Latin and ancient Greek to Hindi, Malay, modern French, Italian and Navajo… A Texan organisation, Global Language Monitor, has announced that English will acquire its 1,000,000th word on 10th June 2009…

‘Critics fall into three camps. The first says that the number is too high…Even the Oxford English Dictionary can only scrape together 600,000. Literary pundits have counted 20,000 to 30,000 words in Shakespeare’s works and between 50,000 and 60,000 in Churchill’s tomes. Apparently no other author comes close. Most 20th century estimates of the entire language’s vocabulary clung to a figure around the 500,000 mark.

‘The second camp of critics argue that, if we agree that ‘am’, ‘is’ and ‘are’ are different words, then so are ‘give’, ‘gives’, ‘gave’, ‘given’ and ‘giving’. This would bump up an estimated number of 50,000 verbs to 250,000… If we insist that cat/cats are two, that would give us another 50,000 nouns to chalk up…

‘The Oxford Dictionary lists 47,000 words which it describes as ‘obsolete’ but which nevertheless belong to English linguistic history. English… abounds in hundreds of thousands of scientific words. There are apparently 1m named insect species! Then, there is the hyphen dilemma. If thirty-one, thirty-two and thirty-three are separate words, then so are two-hundred-and-fifty-three, etc. So by counting in this manner one can add in another million…

‘[Then again] what is a word? (third camp of critics). Robert Beard (PhD Linguistics) tells us that there is no such thing as a word. They may appear as such written down but, when spoken, they do not have separate existences but simply stream out … The third camp also debate whether we should count words like ‘welkin’ (Shakespearean for ‘sky’), Lancashire dialect words such as ‘chowf’, ‘powfagged’ and ‘baggin’ (pulling a face, exhausted, and food to take down the mine) and domesticated foreign imports such as ‘spaghetti’ and ‘hors d’oeuvre’.

‘Finally, do we actually need a million words? A University of Chicago professor said recently that the average American uses about 7,500 words a day… Studies of British workers’ speech suggest this figure should be closer to 750. Ogden’s “Basic English” asserted that anything could be said using his list of 850 words…’

Comment: Lewis makes several good points. In addition, it’s probably more surprising that people’s vocabularies are even that extensive, given contemporary Britons’ propensity to find their literary inspiration in soap operas, tabloid newspapers and so-called reality television. To misquote Francis Thompson: ‘Oh my Shakespeare and my Churchill, long ago…’