Texan wordsmiths at the Global Language Monitor based in Austin, announced yesterday that the one millionth word in the English language was Web 2.0.

How they came to decide which word was one millionth is beyond our grasp, but the organization claims a neologism is created every 98 minutes. At Fudzilla, it usually takes us less than 98 seconds to create one, but that's beside the point.

To qualify as a new word, the newly coined term has to be used more than 25,000 times in print, and it has to appear in more regions than one. It has more than 1.53 billion speakers worldwide, and more than 600,000 words listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Compared to English, some other European languages look like instruction manuals for USB sticks. French has 100,000 words, while the Spaniards can boast 250,000. The Bosnian language has about 350,000 words, but around 200,000 of those describe the physical act of love, while another 100,000 are various other profanities. (We made this bit up.sub.ed.)

Obviously some scholars are not thrilled about the choice, or the idea to choose a one millionth word to begin with.

David Crystal, professor of linguistics at Bangor University, called the idea "the biggest load of rubbish I've heard in years". "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."

Even the GLM admitted there was a shedload of words they didn't take into account. Paul JJ Payack, the president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor, emailed Crystal saying there was more than 600,000 species of fungus alone, and that's not even counting the inbred mutant ones on my shower curtain.

Anyway, some other candidates for the word were "coddies", "chengguan", "fundoo", "slumdog", "sexting", "noob", "bangsters", "slumdog" and one the guys at Nvidia would have loved, "greenwashing" which apparently denotes "re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly, and quendy-trendy."