Milestone in English, but should all of these count?

NEW YORK — Are you a locavore who decries the tapafication of restaurants or a latte liberal on the fence about Billary? No matter, the explosion of new words in the English language is enough to make you want to bury your head under a blankie or run off to Godzone.

English always has been a mongrel language, but thanks to e-mail and the Internet, the global spread of English and a playful response to changing times, new words and phrases are cropping up so quickly that one language-watcher calculates English is bearing down on a milestone: its 1-millionth word.

"English is like an open language that absorbs every type of word from all different languages," said Paul Payack, who runs Global Language Monitor, a Web site and language-consulting business. "English is a people's language. It grows from the ground up."

Payack, whose Web-based word-watching started in 1999 with YourDictionary.com, figures there are about 995,000 words in the English language. This year, he forecasts, the mother tongue of William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln will tip over the seven-figure mark.

In contrast, Payack said, Spanish has about 275,000 words, and French about 100,000.

Using a series of mathematical formulas, Payack tracks new words as they crop up in databases of printed materials, such as major newspapers and magazines, and on the Internet.

If the number of citations reaches what Payack considers a critical mass, he adds the word to his master lexicon, which he compiled by assembling the word lists of about a dozen major English dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's unabridged dictionary.

Among his recent additions are "bagonize," to describe the agonizing feeling of waiting for your luggage at an airport baggage carousel, and "smirting," the combination of smoking and flirting that takes place in doorways in an era when indoor smoking is increasingly taboo.

Scholars and dictionary editors cast doubt on Payack's methods and said an accurate word count is impossible. But they agreed that English has word-spinning built into its DNA.

The language has Germanic origins, but French was grafted onto it when the French-speaking Normans conquered England in 1066. During the Renaissance, Latin words became the vogue, and as the British Empire spread, its colonies contributed their own distinctive flavors.

"More than half of our vocabulary is from other cultures," said Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, which chose "subprime" as the 2007 word of the year.

Non-native speakers are every bit as likely to coin new words and phrases as native speakers.

"Studies show that when kids learn English in Singapore, they think they own the language," said the San Diego-based Payack. "They take it, they twist it."

Chief among the skeptics who dismiss the countdown to the millionth word is Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large for the Oxford English Dictionary, which is widely regarded as the most authoritative compilation of English words.

"I think it's nonsense," he said. "People don't agree on what a word is."

The Global Language Monitor, he continued, is "counting something very exactly that simply cannot be counted very exactly."

Are all forms of the verb "run" counted as separate words? What about numbers?

"If you were to count every number between 0 and 999,999 as a word, you'd have a cool million right there," he wrote in an article on Slate last year.

Payack countered that he counts only "head words," or the main forms of a word. "Run" is in, "ran" is an also-ran.

"We count the number of stars, we count the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, we count how many people there are," said Payack, who uses his formulas to advise businesses on such things as new product names. "A thought spoken: That's the Old English definition of a word."