It could have been "coddies", "chengguan", "slumdog" or even "fundoo". "Jai Ho!" would have been fun. Even "noob" wouldn't have been that bad. But when a group of US wordsmiths in Texas claimed today that the millionth word in the English language was Web 2.0, there must have been collective sigh of disappointment among those lexicographers who hadn't already declared the idea preposterous.
The Global Language Monitor (GLM), based in Austin, calculated that a neologism is created on average every 98 minutes and that "Web 2.0", a term for the next generation of internet applications, should be formally crowned the millionth word.
Paul JJ Payack, the president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor, said that the contenders to be the millionth word had come from Silicon Valley, India, China, and Poland, as well as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK. "English has become a universal means of communication. Never before have so many people been able to communicate so easily with so many others," he said.
With more than 1.53 billion speakers around the world, and more than 600,000 words listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, the English language dwarfs neighbouring European tongues. French registers a mere 100,000 words, while the Spanish fare only slightly better with 250,000.
GLM's figure gives English twice as many words as Mandarin Chinese, the world's second most abundant language.
"The million-word milestone brings to notice the coming of age of English as the first truly global language," saidPayack.
Needless to say, academics are sceptical. Professor David Crystal, professor of linguistics at Bangor University, called the idea "the biggest load of rubbish I've heard in years".
He said: "It is total nonsense. English reached 1 million words years ago. It's like someone standing by the side of the road counting cars, and when they get to 1 million pronouncing that to be the millionth car in the world. It's extraordinary."
Having blogged about the forthcoming event on his website, Crystal received a reply from Payack admitting, that with 600,000 species of fungus, there were undoutedly "many more than 1 million English words" and adding that the number was an estimate.
"The million-word march is meant to celebrate the richness, cultural diversity and the dynamic growth of English," Payack said.
Linguistic spats aside, what the "millionth" new word would has been a subject of intense debate. Words are analysed according to the number of citations, geographical spread and number of appearances in media and on the internet. Contenders included bangsters (across between a banker and a gangster) and sexting (sending email or text messages with sexual content). Others vying for the title were wonderstar, after Susan Boyle's spectacular rise and fall on TV talent show Britain's Got Talent, greenwashing, re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly, and quendy-trendy, allegedly a British youth term for hip or up-to-date.