If given a chance, could you cope with 155 billion traffic signs, 155 billion musical notes, 155 billion beliefs, or with 155 billion smells, sights, colours (or colors), truths, thoughts, snowflakes, avalanches, and dollars, to name a few?
If you don’t expect to cope with 155 billion of anything, even if you lived long enough, then what makes you think you can cope with 155 billion English words in just one lifetime? (Forget about the world’s non-English words for now.)
To understand 155 billion words, I think it’s best if you can convince yourself to pay the bulk of your attention to the story of words below for a minute or two.
Depicted in the story of words is evidence of the fact that our planet has survived wordless during the first 4.65 billion years since its birth, but also that it remains wordless today.
Sure, having appeared 13,750 years ago, the words exist beyond the shadow of a doubt, but with less matter than the neutrino, the ghost particle, it so happens that words cannot be detected inside of a word-user by even the world’s most sensitive detector in existence, the LUX-Zeplin, in South Dakota, USA.
That’s just one of the reasons the appearance of the word has revolutionized evolution.
But that’s about evolution, a different story altogether (which will be addressed in a future post soon).
Back to the word.
The word defies our understanding of how the universe works, except that our ancestors named it (uni)verse for a reason.
Word number one
Back 13,750 years ago — the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice, and writing hadn’t been invented yet — when the first word was spoken, the number of words was 1 (one) by definition.
We shall never know what that first word was because the animal that spoke it has long been extinct, the witnesses are gone, and 13,750 years is a long time by most word-user standards.
We assume what spoke the first word was probably an animal, rather than a plant, that resembled us today. However, we don’t know which animal that might have been.
For all we know, they might have been different animals on different continents thousands of years apart, for the simple reason that words didn’t appear everywhere on Earth at the same time.
We also don’t know what the 1st word was, what said it to what, and what the one who heard it said back to the speaker.
What we do know for a fact is that more words got added over time.
How so?
Well, in the same way as “The chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs” (Marshall McLuhan), so “The word-user was the word’s idea for getting more words” (Beat Schindler).
Both strategies, the egg’s and the word’s, paid off in more ways than one.
Words today
In the wordless world
In the wordless world, words don’t exist for self-evident reasons.
In the wordy world
In the wordy world of word-users, we’ve gone from 1 word 13,750 years ago, to the following numbers now (see below):
- 24.9 million words
According to wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary “the world’s most-read reference work” - 4.5 billion words
According to collins.co.uk/pages/elt “analytical database with over 4.5 billion words” - 21.36 billion words
According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries “the world’s most-read reference work” - 37.725 billion words
According to www.english-corpora.org “the most widely used collection of corpora anywhere in the world” - 155 billion words
According to www.english-corpora.org “the most widely used collection of corpora anywhere in the world”
In addition to the above numbers of words, the wordy also invented the world wide web, also known as the internet, which now gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than anything invented for that purpose before.
Where have 155 billion words got us?
155 billion words — with more added as we speak — have got us to the state the world is in, which is a different story entirely.
You will be pleased to hear that the state of the world will also be covered in a forthcoming post soon.
PS.
For your reading pleasure, if so inclined, regarding the insightful McLuhan quote above, click here for Marshall McLuhan Quotes Worth Reading Twice.
Call to action
In the meantime, join my waitlist to ensure you’ll be notified when my “Limitless Opportunities” and “Limitless Writing” courses start later this year when the harvest moon rises anew, give or take a few.
