"The Million Word March"

"...The gap between the words people use and the words that appear in dictionaries might be on the rise." This is the main claim that author Anika Gupta makes in her article, "The Million Word March." She speaks of how the English language consists of over a million different words and is still continuing to grow, however, most standard dictionaries contain a mere 200,000 words. This is because, as Gupta explains, the dictionaries of our generation disregard words for being either too technical, too young, or even popular brand names as well as foreign words and phrases. In her article, Gupta quotes Paul JJ Payack when he says that a word is defined as, "a thought spoken," and therefore, if an individual speaks a word out loud, then it is technically considered to be a real word. Using the Monitor, Payack decided to track all kinds of words over the internet, even those that the dictionary rejects, in order to see the momentum or popularity of such words. What they ultimately found was that not only did the internet quickly add a wide range of new words to the English language, but it has also "taken existing words to new ears." Overall, the English language is endlessly growing and will never be entirely known or used by any individual.