According to the Global Language Monitor, English adds another new word every 98 minutes or about 15  a day.  I don’t think they ever kick any old words out so we now have 1 million English words.  That seems like a waste.  That is a lot more words than we need.  The typical American only knows about 20,000 words and only uses about 7,500 of them in a given day.  So we have a lot a valuable brain space occupied with words we don’t use.

I don’t know what the solution might be but when we have way to much stuff at our house, we have a garage sale.  Maybe we could have a garage sale to some other countries that don’t have as many words.  We could price the words very cheap.  As the day is winding down if we still have lots of words left, when someone buys one word we could give them two or three more – that’s what I do at our garage sales.  Then at the end of the day what ever words are left, let’s just throw them away.  We will probably never miss them.

My experience has been that you have to have one of these sales every year or the clutter will build up again.  I think we need to get moving on this as soon as possible.