Well, isn't this convenient... according to the Global Language Monitor, the phrase "Web 2.0" has become the one-millionth word in the English language... narrowly beating out "Noob," "Slumdog," and "Cloud Computing."

Firstly... yes, English does have more words than any other language. The British Empire kind of spread English everywhere... and unlike French and Spanish, English acts like a sponge, absorbing every word it can find! Taboo, Tatoo, Tortilla, you get the picture.

But... I call shenanigans. I think this thing was rigged to get maximum press coverage. "Web 2.0" is not a word, its a phrase. Also, it has been around for about 7 years now, and was hugely popular in the technology field for the past 5. It is a much more common phrase than "Cloud Computing." The word count folks claim that it needs to be mentioned 25,000 times before its an "official" word... But the New York Times alone mentioned it on 2,700 occasions! I'm sure a survey of other sites would demonstrate that this word hit the 25,000 sweet spot many years ago...

Others are likewise skeptical:

Part of what makes determining the number of words in a language so difficult is that there are so many root words and their variants, said Sarah Thomason, president of the Linguistic Society of America and a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan... Thomason called the million-word count a "sexy idea" that is "all hype and no substance."

I'll agree there...