1,000,000 words!
As the one millionth word enters the English lexicon, the joys of our truly global language.

By Simon Winchester writing in The Telegraph, 06 Jun 2009

I will always remember the magical moment when I saw and heard a brand new English word being created. It happened on a commuter train from Oxford to Paddington, during the evening rush, and I witnessed the word being conjured, in an instant, right out of thin air.
Earlier that day I had been in Broadmoor Asylum, researching the strange and tortured Victorian life of an American doctor who had murdered a Londoner in a fit of schizophrenic fury.

The doctor was a clever man, with a vast library in his cell, and in an effort to rehabilitate himself he had volunteered, anonymously, to help make contributions to the Oxford English Dictionary, then under construction in a tin shed in the back garden of James Murray's house on Banbury Road.
But his madness, which ebbed and flowed during his 40-year incarceration, became exceptionally florid one day in 1902, and in a sudden spasm of self-loathing he sliced off his penis with a knife, and flung it into the prison fire.

My discovery of this remarkable event answered a small but singular question: just why the man's work for the OED had suddenly faded away. Delighted with the find, I went promptly up to the OED offices in Oxford to tell everyone and then I walked over to Oxford station.
At the ticket window were two elderly women lexicographers, off to London for the theatre. As we boarded the train, I warned them: have I ever got a story to tell you.

And so, in every gruesome detail, and in an open-plan Thameslink carriage, I related the saga: the sharpening of the blade, the tying of the ligature, the gritted teeth, the fatal slice – and, as I said this, so every whey-faced businessman in the carriage crossed his legs reflexively. There was a sudden corporate gasp.
But not from the two old ladies. They remained quite impassive, thinking. I could see the lexicographical gears grinding in their minds. Then suddenly, and in unison I swear, they spoke: "Autopeotomy!" they cried. Then one to the other: "Yes, Mildred – peotomy is the amputation of the penis. But doing it yourself – that must be autopeotomy. A neologism, I am sure. And Mr Winchester, if you can include this new word in an illustrative sentence in the book you are writing, then we will include it in the next edition of the OED, and you'll be a small part of history."

Read the rest of Simon Winchester's entertaining piece at The Telegraph online.