Sunday, January 09, 2011

The year in language - The Boston Globe

A sign of the times

One amazing finding: They estimated “that 52% of the English lexicon — the majority of the words used in English books — consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.” They found vast quantities of words like aridification, slenthem (a musical instrument), and deletable, none of them in normal dictionaries. Time to get crackin’, fellow lexicographers!

The year in language - The Boston Globe

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