It all began when I yielded to a frivolous temptation and ordered online a paper copy of “ Grandiloquent words – a pictoric lexicon of ostrobogulous locutions” by Jason Travis Ott.
As I first opened the book I was fascinated, intrigued and horrified at the same time: far beyond my expectations, it listed a staggering number of English words no one in his right mind would ever use in speech or writing before the fourth or fifth beer, and even then with extreme caution.
Each entry was complete with definition, quotations, dating and etymology.
Chilling.
The worst came as while leafing through it I run into a bizarre word *) that long ago some prankster proposed (badly misspelled and bare of any explanation) as a new Etymonline entry.
OK, I was wrong, it was no amateurish improvisation: allegedly in a remote past the word existed – together with the other 227 reported in the book and the devil knows how many others no one ever bothered to record.
Which reproposes the eternal question: which words deserve a place in a good sensible dictionary? How complete should (or can) a good dictionary be?
Many old words die hard, countless new words sprout like mushrooms after the rain. Keeping trace of them all is virtually impossible because the new fancy ones keep popping up while one writes, and the old undead ones keep resurfacing like zombies out of control.
How many f**ing words are there altogether, then???
I played a little with the calculator (rainy Sunday, you know) and came to a rough but still stunning estimate: limiting the evaluation to a reasonable maximum of 12 character per word (let’s leave out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious & co.) and constraining it to English (no diacritics, no special characters etc.), there are exactly 99,246,114,928,149,462 ‘words’ one can write with 26 characters – over 99 quadrillions.
Now let’s be honest and assume (a shot in the dark, of course) that only one in a million of those ‘words’ is pronounceable and that only one in a thousand of the surviving ones may make a sense of sorts if properly stretched with enough perverse fantasy.
This leaves us with approximately 99 millions potential entries that would fill about two million pages, tantamount to ~1000 thick tomes to be fitted in ca. 100 normal shelves – “we need a larger apartment, darling” 
.
No one alive would ever have time to consult such a “complete” dictionary, not to mention compiling and editing it, which would be a full-time job for many generations of wordaholics. There must be a good effective criterion to prune those 99 millions potential entries down to a few hundreds of thousands, something a normal human being can handle and survive.
Unfortunately though the only decent criterion that occurs to me has no place in any known exact science: it’s called common sense and at least so far it’s an exquisitely human prerogative. To the one who manages to provide a deterministic, unquestionable, non-tautological definition of it I’m ready to buy a barrel of excellent Bavarian beer 
Prost! 
–
*) “Ultracrepidarian”, n.: from a Latin proverb “Ne ultra crepidam sutor iudicaret” (more or less, “Cobbler, don’t comment beyond the shoes!”): someone who pontificates about topics he’s little familiar with.
