The English language will celebrate its one millionth word next month, with "defriend", "noob" and "chiconomics" among the candidates, linguistic experts have predicted.
The milestone will be passed at 10.22am on June 10 according to the Global Language Monitor, an association of academics that tracks the use of new words.
The widespread popularity of English as a second language in Asia has brought about the most fertile period of word generation since William Shakespeare’s time with new terms coined on average every 98 minutes, the Texas-based group claims.
It acknowledges new words once they have been used 25,000 times by media outlets, on social networking websites and in other sources.
The terms it is currently monitoring which could take English to the one million threshold include "defollow" and "defriend", words describing what users of websites like Twitter and Facebook to do contacts with whom they do not wish to stay in touch.
May 8, 2009
