Here’s a bit of self- indulgence: a post about an online linguistic experiment. Normal service will resume shortly!
A few years ago, I made up some new words and seeded them on the Internet to see how much they’d grow. I posted the new words on this blog (here’s the original post) then strategically placed them on a few other sites and forums. At the time, all these words resulted in zero results when searching for them on Google. A few months later I googled the words to see how much they’d spread: not very much at all. I soon forgot all about this little experiment, forgot all about the new words except for one: pansentient.
Today I googled my words again and had a bit of a shock: since the last time I checked, my word “paramementic” has grown by 92% and the word “multifrantic” by a reasonable 487%. But googling pansentient, the number of results has rocketed by an amazing 65,500%!!