Recent research suggests that the English language has doubled in size over the last century. It continues to grow by 8,500 words a year and now stands at 1,022,000 words.'
The pace of this growth is accelerating, with the word count expanding by more than 70 per cent since 1950. In the previous half-century, this growth was only 10 per cent.
This is part of a general linguistic trend towards globalisation. As English terms enter other languages, an increasing number of loanwords come from the other direction. These often describe 'foreign' concepts: feng shui, from Chinese, for example. Science & Technology
New vocabulary categories have also accompanied advances in science and technology. These often draw on existing loanwords. Digital, for example, comes from the Latin for digit or finger.
