Words, Words, Words – a Skyscrimble for Slaw

The wonderful Erik Heels told me ten years ago about a websiteCould it have been Random Website, Erik? that took one at random to unexpected destinations on Mr. Gore’s Information Superhighway.

I’ve lost the link, of course, but each week I try and stop by a wonderfully quirky collection of links at Web Zen.

This week’s links will I think appeal to Slaw readers, who are quintessentially people of the written wordI had initially written people of the book without realizing that this has a quite precise meaning in Islamic teaching.

The keeper is the Ask Oxford site, which has access to the Concise Oxford DictionaryThe glories of the full OED are only available on subscription., and a host of shorter Oxford reference works, including a not bad Dictionary of Quotations. Judging from what it turned up on the incomparable Sydney Smith. The Ask Oxford site scotches the dubious scholarship evidenced by the Millionth English Word story that’s abroad this weekend.

The Globe and Mail quotes the researcher:

Mr. Payack, a high-tech executive, came up with his word count by starting with the words in established dictionaries; the Oxford English Dictionary alone contains more than 600,000 words.

Well back to Oxford.

Funny that they didn’t check the OED itself, which clearly states The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use.

And elsewhere WebZen points us to:

* Double-Tongued Word Wrester which records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English.

* A Technical Guide for Editing Gonzo by Hunter S. Thompson’s editor

* The world’s worst opening sentences.

* The Hobo Names list that I linked to back in November.

* Christopher Walken reciting Poe’s The Raven

* And the indescribable“Fine Words Butter No Parsnips,” a website consisting of fiction, art, photography, mechanical things and fortune cookies.