Our Abounding English Language

The other day I went to the bookstore to buy a dictionary. The clerk showed me a really cheap one. I couldn't find the words to thank her.

Then she directed me to a thesaurus. I thought that was an accommodating, altruistic, benevolent, caring, compassionate, considerate, courteous, decent, empathic, gracious, kind, magnanimous, nice, obliging, outreaching, solicitous, sweet, sympathetic, and thoughtful thing to do.

The multitudinous choice of words in English offers both a delightful and daunting challenge to native and nonnative speakers. In William Styron's Sophie's Choice, the heroine, Polish-born Sophie, expresses mock horror at the infinite variety of English words:

"Such a language! ... Too many words. I mean just the word for velocite. I mean fast. Rapid. Quick. All the same thing! A scandal!"

"Swift?" I added.

"How about speedy?" Nathan asked.

"Hasty?" I went on.

"And fleet?" Nathan said. "Though that's a bit fancy."

"Stop it!" Sophie said, laughing." Too much! Too many words, this English. In French it is so simple. You just say vite."

You should not be aghast, amazed, appalled, astonished, astounded, bewildered, blown away, boggled, bowled over, bumfuzzled, caught off base, confounded, dumbfounded, electrified, flabbergasted, floored, flummoxed, overwhelmed, shocked, startled, stunned, stupefied, surprised, taken aback, thrown, or thunderstruck by this o'erflowing cornucopia of synonyms in our marvelous language.

English boasts by far the largest number of words of all languages, 616,500 officially enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary. That's almost four times the vocabulary size of its nearest competitor, German; five times the size of Russian, in third place; and six times the size of Spanish and French, tied for fourth. As a result, English possesses a plethora of synonyms that allow greater nuances of meaning than are available in other tongues.

A much-lauded-and-applauded New Yorker cartoon puckishly celebrated our linguistic treasure trove. The cartoon's caption read: "Roget's Brontosaurus," and pictured was a big dinosaur in whose thought bubble appeared: "Large, great, huge, considerable, bulky, voluminous, ample, massive, capacious, spacious, mighty, towering, monstrous . ..." If not for the finite capacity of thought bubbles, the artist could have added: "big, Brobdingnagian, colossal, enormous, gargantuan, gigantic, grand, hefty, hulking, humongous, husky, immense, jumbo, leviathan, looming, lumbering, mammoth, mountainous, ponderous, prodigious, sizable, substantial, tremendous, vast, weighty, whopping."

Such a cartoon would be far less likely to appear in a magazine printed in a language other than English. Books like Roget's Thesaurus are foreign to speakers of most other languages. Given the scope of their vocabularies, they have little need of them.

I hesitate to conclude this song of praise to the glories of English with dark news. But I regret to inform you that yesterday, a senior editor of Roget's Thesaurus assumed room temperature, bit the dust, bought the farm, breathed his last, came to the end of the road, cashed in his chips, cooled off, croaked, deep sixed, expired, gave up the ghost, headed for the hearse, headed for the last roundup, kicked off, kicked the bucket, lay down one last time, lay with the lilies, left this mortal plain, met his maker, met Mr. Jordan, passed away, passed in his checks, passed on, perished, permanently changed his address, pulled the plug, pushed up daisies, returned to dust, slipped his cable, slipped his mortal coil, sprouted wings, took the dirt nap, took the long count, pegged out, traveled to kingdom come, turned up his toes, went across the creek, went belly up, went to glory, went the way of all flesh, went to his final reward, went west — and, of course, he died.

Doing a Number on English

For those who think that our civilization is obsessed with time, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary recently added support to that theory by announcing that the word time is the most often-used noun in the English language. The dictionary relied on the Oxford English Corpus — a research project into English in the twenty-first century — to come up with the lists.

The Oxford English Corpus gives us the fullest, most accurate picture of the language today. It represents all types of English, from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines to the language of chatrooms, e-mails, and Weblogs. And, as English is a global language, used by an estimated one third of the world's population, the Oxford Corpus contains language from all parts of the world — not only from the United Kingdom and the United States, but also from Australia, the Caribbean, Canada, India, Singapore, and South Africa. It is the largest English corpus of its type — the most representative slice of the English language available.

According to the Corpus, the is the most commonly used word overall, followed by be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I. Typical of such frequency lists, the most used words are hardworking function words that hold sentences together. The study also reveals that these ten words and their variations account for 25 percent of all written content.

These top ten are all single-syllable words. In fact, the sixty most frequently used words on the list are monosyllabic, as are ninety-four of the first one hundred. That's because Anglo Saxon concision and simplicity are the heart and soul of our language.

English is the most democratically hospitable...