My brain hurts. Sometimes, my head feels so full of stuff that I can't take in one new thing without losing one. Sorry I forgot your birthday, Sis, I had to remember who was running for county commissioner. I apologize for forgetting your name; I had to remember what "wiki" means:
LONDON - A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as "podcast" and "celebutante" to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday.
[. . .]
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.
Cripes. That's almost as many words as McDonald's has sold hamburgers. If our knowledge base is growing by leaps and bounds, it makes sense that the number of words is, too. There are actually only from 500,000 to a million words in English, depending on who is doing the counting and how many scientific words are counted. An educated person knows about 20,000 of them and uses only about 2,000 in a week.
