"Web 2.0" to Become the Millionth U.S. Word

Paul Lilly — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:10:04 -0500

It's official - the Global Language Monitor, which analyzes and tracks trends in language, has dubbed "Web 2.0" as the one millionth word. To qualify, potential words must appear 25,000 times in searches and be widely accepted. Web 2.0 fit that criteria, beating out Jai Ho, Noob, Slumdog, and Cloud Computing (among others) as the millionth English word or phrase.

The list has some linguists up in arms, who dismissed the whole thing as nothing more than a publicity stunt.

"I think it's pure fraud. I'ts not bad science. It's nonsense," Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters.

His and other similar opinions didn't seem to phase Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, who insisted that his method has merit.

"If you want to count the stars in the sky, you have to define what a star is first and then count," Payack said. "Our criteria is quite plain and if you follow those criteria you can count words. Most academics say what we are doing is very valuable."

Word up.

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"Web 2.0" to Become the Millionth U.S. Word