According to the title of
this article, the English language now has one billion words. Or maybe not.
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.
A lot of this stuff is recent slang and jargon like "celebutante" and "retail politics." I have no idea what the latter even means.
Launched in January 2000, the Oxford English Corpus is part of the world's largest-funded language research project, costing $90,000-$107,000 per year.
It has helped identify how the spellings of common phrases have changed, such as "fazed by" to "phased by" or "free rein" to "free reign."
"Buck naked" increasingly has evolved to "butt naked."
Dang, I gots to get my hands on some of that sweet, sweet research cash. I think I could put together a study on the usage of terms like "n00b" and "teh sux0rz." Cha-ching!
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