So is it or is it not the one millionth word in the English language?

Earlier this month, the US-based Global Language Monitor, whose computer models check billions of websites – including the Global Top 5,000 media sites – dictionaries, scholarly publications and news articles to see how frequently words are used, crowned Web 2.0 as the one millionth word or phrase in the English language.

Other linguists have however slammed it as nonsense and a stunt.

The Global Language Monitor’s argument is that Web 2.0 appeared over 25,000 times in searches and was widely accepted, making it the legitimate, one millionth word.

Other linguists have pooh-poohed the claim, saying it was impossible to count English words in use or to agree on how many times a word must be used before it is officially accepted.

"I think it's pure fraud ... It's not bad science. It's nonsense," said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, in turn pooh-poohed the criticism. "If you want to count the stars in the sky, you have to define what a star is first and then count. Our criteria is quite plain and if you follow those criteria you can count words. Most academics say what we are doing is very valuable.”

By his calculations, about 14.7 new English words or phrases are generated daily and said the five words leading up to the millionth highlighted how English was changing along with current social trends.

This list included "Jai Ho!", an exclamation signifying victory or accomplishment in Hindi and "slumdog", an unkind term for a person living in a slum that became popular with the Oscar-winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire."

The list also included "cloud computing", meaning services delivered via the Internet, "carbon neutral", an activity that doesn't produce heat-trapping carbon emissions and "n00b", a new or inexperienced user usually with technology.

News events have also fueled the rapid expansion of English, which Payack 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" have all 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.

We wonder when Web 3.0 will be counted as a word.