The Wordlab database currently contains 808 Boat Names. If you're looking for more, try Ten Thousand Boat Names, an under-achievingly named resource that currently has 24,467 boat names in its database, and counting.
Apparently, when they named their site and locked it to a domain name, they never thought they would grow much beyond 10,000. The site contains many repeats of names, since people are entering actual boat names, but it's still a valuable resource for anyone looking for a new name. And who might such people be? A search for "name" brings up many boat names that reveal the impasse their owners faced when trying to come up with a name:
(NO NAME) being renamed BOATNAME Couldnt agree on a name. currently not named First Step (until we find a better name) good ole whats her name has yet to be named have not named her yet I havent named it. Looking for a name Name not picked nameless new boat - no name yet NO CRRENT NAME no name No Name (yet) NO Name on the boat yet I am still thinking No name yet no name yet but open for ideas not named Not Named as yet Not named at this time. Not named so far not named yet not named yet but thinking,,, Not yet named Notnamed Still thinking about a name for boat still working on a name To be named to be renamed, as yet undecided UN-NAMED un-named UnNamed unnamed as of yet Unnamed at this time Unnamed for now
They should have come to Wordlab.
Posted by
Jay on Saturday, August 15, 2009 @ 10:32 AM
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The English language received its official unofficial one millionth word this morning at 5:22 a.m. ET. And, just in time for the coming Web 3.0 phenomena, the one millionth word is...wait for it...
Of course, "Web 2.0" being crowned the One Millionth English Word, and having the coronation at exactly 5:22 this morning, is just an estimate, made buy a website called the Global Language Monitor, "a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created." I like that: words used to describe a math formula used to estimate how many words there are that could be put to use to describe math formulas that estimate...well, you get the picture.
[Global Language Monitor] estimates the millionth English word, "Web 2.0" was added to the language Wednesday at 5:22 a.m. ET. The term refers to the second, more social generation of the Internet.
The site says more than 14 words are added to English every day, at the current rate.
The "Million Word March," however, has made the man who runs this word-counting project somewhat of a pariah in the linguistic community. Some linguists say it's impossible to count the number of words in a language because languages are always changing, and because defining what counts as a word is a fruitless endeavor.
Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor, says, however, that the million-word estimation isn't as important as the idea behind his project, which is to show that English has become a complex, global language.
"It's a people's language," he said.
Other languages, like French, Payack said, put big walls around their vocabularies. English brings others in.
"English has the tradition of swallowing new words whole," he said. "Other languages translate."
Certainly that's what Wordlab has always been about: swallowing new words whole...and then regurgitating them in new combinations.
Still, Payack says he doesn't include all new words in his count. Words must make sense in at least 60 percent of the world to be official, he said. And they must make sense to different communities of people. A new technology term that's only understood in Silicon Valley wouldn't count as a mainstream word, he said.
His computer models check a total of 5,000 dictionaries, scholarly publications and news articles, as well as billions of Web sites, to see how frequently words are used, he said. A word must make 25,000 appearances to be deemed legitimate.
Payack said news events have also fueled the rapid expansion of English, which he said has more words than any other language. Mandarin Chinese comes in second with about 450,000 words, he said.
English terms like "Obamamania," "defriend," "wardrobe malfunction," "zombie banks," "shovel ready" and "recessionista" all have grown out of recent news cycles about the presidential election, economic crash, online networking or a sports event, he said. Other languages might not have developed new terms to deal with such phenomena, he said.
That the true beauty and power of English, and its new global function: serving as a language laboratory for the entire world. An interesting corollary question would be how many English words die out every day, week or month? None of these new words get carved in stone, and even the Oxford English Dictionary is filled with many archaic words no longer in use.
Language experts who spoke with CNN said they disapprove of Payack's count, but they agree that English generally has more words than most, if not all, languages.
"This is stuff that you just can't count," said Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. "No one can count it, and to pretend that you can is totally disingenuous. It simply can't be done."
The Oxford English Dictionary has about 600,000 entries, Sheidlower said. But that by no means includes all words, he said.
... Part of what makes determining the number of words in a language so difficult is that there are so many root words and their variants, said Sarah Thomason, president of the Linguistic Society of America and a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan.
... Linguists and lexicographers run into further complications when trying to count words that are spelled one way but can have several meanings, said Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Illinois, and an officer at the American Dialect Society.
"The word bear, b-e-a-r -- is that two words or one, for example? You have a noun that's a wild creature and then you have b-e-a-r, [which means] to bear left or to bear right, and there's many other things," he said. "So you really can't be exact about a millionth word."
Can any of these linguists or word-counters bear to get into pun territory? Absolutely each meaning of "bear" and every other word should count as a separate word -- again, multiple meanings, puns, homonyms, all are part of what gives the English language so much flavor and customizability (not a word, BTW, according to the OED). Call it Language 3.0 if you must (but really, please don't -- I'm just planting a virus here).
[Payack] said the count is meant to be a celebration of English as a global language. And, while he says other languages are being stamped out by English's expansion, it's a powerful thing that so many people today are able to communicate with such a vast list of words.
Here here, brother. As William S. Burroughs famously said, "Language is a virus". And English, with its metastasizing foam of wordbirth and worddeath, is the smallpox of languages.
Posted by
Jay on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 @ 10:20 AM
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Snark here, the co-founder of Wordlab, to let you know about a new website I've just launched called Mass Observer.
Reading between the lines, peering between the cracks, and turning over stones to see what lies beneath, Mass Observer aims to observe and report on interesting and unusual incidents, events, occurrences, people, and phenomena, anywhere in this or any other world.
The name was inspired by the Mass Observation group of England. Check it out.
Posted by
Jay on Thursday, March 12, 2009 @ 4:35 PM
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Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.
These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Posted by
Michael Davey on Monday, February 16, 2009 @ 10:01 AM
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To be sure, there are a couple of good gooses still in the chamber - 1.) we'll get some amount of yelp higher from the decision to tinker with the mark-to-market methodology; 2.) at some point we'll get an announcement from the all-new and naturally improving SEC that they're bringing back the uptick rule to help stave off those wicked short-sellers; 3.) we're going to get more than vague vagaries from TG and the Treasury plan - since a.) the bond auction will be out of the way and they can stop worrying less about stocks for the moment and b.) it is pretty clear the Street wants something in the neighborhood of details about the promised plan as opposed to someone instead stressing over and over again just how "uncertain" everything is (uh, the Street hates uncertainty...p.1 in your manual). More...
Posted by
Michael Davey on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 @ 10:34 PM
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His name was Charles Ponzi, pictured at right, and Mental Floss notes,
Anyone can work a simple swindle, but you have to be a special kind of con man to have your name become synonymous with "fraud."
Read the article, it's a great story. At one point near the end, when his great con was unraveling, Ponzi hired a PR flak named William McMasters,
...but the PR man saw through Ponzi's lies and renounced his client in the press. James Walsh reprints part of McMasters' slam of Ponzi in his book, You Can't Cheat An Honest Man. Of Ponzi, McMasters said, "The man is a financial idiot. He can hardly add...He sits with his feet on the desk smoking expensive cigars in a diamond holder and talking complete gibberish about postal coupons."
Certainly an apt symbol of our own troubled, fraudulent times.
Posted by
Jay on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 @ 1:35 PM
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You read that right: Lake Superior State University, baby, has done what Harvard, Stanford and The Wharton School don't have the guts to do: put out a list of idiotic (mostly) bizspeak words and phrases that if used any longer should get students tossed out of MBA programs and cubicle-wads sacked from their consultant jobs.
Check out the 2008 list of Banished Words, which includes the word that most makes me want to seek out fingernails scratching a blackboard for relief: webinar.
Posted by
Jay on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 @ 1:14 PM
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Snark Hunting has a nice summary of the shift in pet name trends from 1998 to 2007. As pets have become child surrogates for many people, they have begun to get the same names that kids are getting. That's certainly true for our family cat Pirate.
Posted by
Jay on Saturday, June 28, 2008 @ 12:24 PM
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Here's a discussion thread that should be of interest to the Wordlab community: Words that sound dirty, but they're not. A sampling of the gems to be found here:
Can you tell which aliens are good and which are evil, the Smoothheads or the Bumpyheads, based on whether they are called "leebish" or "grecious"? If so, you're a good candidate for testing at Carnegie Mellon, where researchers have shown that naming things with labels creates mental categories, helping people learn faster. So reports today's New York Times, in the article, When Language Can Hold the Answer:
The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.
In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?
The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.
The gist is that language "greases the wheels of perception." However, after that initial greasing, it can then get in the way:
In another experiment, Dr. Lupyan showed subjects a series of chairs and tables using pictures from the Ikea catalog. Some subjects were asked to press a button indicating that the picture was of a table or a chair. Other subjects pressed a button to make a nonverbal judgment about the pictures, for example, to indicate whether they liked them or not. Dr. Lupyan found that the subjects who used words to label the objects had more trouble remembering whether they’d seen a specific chair before than subjects who had only pressed a button in a nonverbal task.
Language helps us learn novel categories, and it licenses our unusual ability to operate on an abstract plane, Dr. Lupyan said. The problem is that after a category has been learned, it can distort the memory of specific objects, getting between us and the rest of the nonabstract world.
Posted by
Jay on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 @ 11:10 PM
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