The Manifesto

The Oxford English Dictionary contains over 600,000 words. The Second Edition runs to twenty volumes. It weighs over sixty kilograms in its printed form. This is often described with a certain pride—as if a language with more words is a richer language.

English is the most widely spoken second language on Earth. Over one billion people use it every day. And yet its core vocabulary is a museum of dead religions, forgotten emperors, and miscounted numbers.