Christopher Shea takes a look at what a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists—along with the Google Books team—have discovered about word usage.
Published in Science,…[it’s] the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has 348,000). More than half of the language, the authors wrote, is “dark matter” that has evaded standard dictionaries.
