The language has Germanic origins, but French was grafted onto it when the French-speaking Normans conquered England in 1066. During the Renaissance, Latin words became the vogue, and as the British empire spread around the globe, its colonies contributed their own distinctive flavors to the language of the rulers.

"More than half of our vocabulary is from other cultures," said Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, which chose "subprime" as the 2007 word of the year. "So we are used to words from a lot of languages, and we're used to a lot of new words coming in."

It also helps that English, reflecting the free-market leanings of England and America, has no official gatekeeper, such as the Academie francaise, which keeps French officially pure of foreign — and especially Anglo-American — influences.

But Payack believes the creation of new words has sped up in recent decades in part because of the rapid growth in the number of people who speak English as either a first or second language. He puts the number at 1.35 billion.

And non-native speakers are every bit as likely to coin new words and phrases as native speakers.

"Studies show that when kids learn English in Singapore, they think they own the language," said the San Diego-based Payack. "They take it, they twist it."

That has given rise to the phenomenon of "Chinglish," a Chinese-English hybrid that yields such coinages as "no noising" for "quiet, please," and "airline pulp" for "airline food."

Chief among the skeptics who dismiss the countdown to the millionth word is Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary, which is widely regarded as the most authoritative compilation of English words.

"I think it's nonsense," he said. "People don't agree on what a word is."

The Global Language Monitor, he continued, is "counting something very exactly that simply cannot be counted very exactly."

Are all forms of the verb "run" counted as separate words? What about numbers?

"If you were to count every number between 0 and 999,999 as a word, you'd have a cool million right there," he wrote in an article on Slate last year.

Payack counters that he counts only "head words," or the main forms of a word. "Run" is in, "ran" is an also-ran.

"We count the number of stars, we count the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, we count how many people there are," said Payack, who also uses his proprietary mathematical formulas to advise businesses on such things as new product names. "A thought spoken: That's the old English definition of a word."