Although today’s word may seem to be a number rather than a word, it’s an example of what Erin McKean means when she says that it doesn’t take the status of being in a dictionary to make something a real word, it’s love. If people love to say something, even if it’s not in the dictionary, that still makes it a word; a real word.

So at some point before 1983 some people began using this number as a word as some kind of shorthand and intensifier for “all the time.” This love for the number as a word forced dictionaries to make space for it.

1983 is when the Oxford English Dictionary has its first citation for 24/7. That was in Sports Illustrated and it quotes Jerry (Ice) Reynolds as calling his jump-shot 24-7-365 because it was good all the time.

Although this is a fairly recent OED entry—it’s from 2003—in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 24/7 is said to have evolved out of prison slang. This appears to be a more recent publication than the OED entry so maybe they know something that the OED didn’t back in 2003. Brewer’s had an entry also in 2000, but it didn’t mention prison slang, so they must have unearthed something.

Having a number in the dictionary as a word reminds me of the question about how many words there are in the English language. Clearly if every number can be a word then there are an infinite number of words in English since there are an infinite number of numbers; and that doesn’t even count words like elbow and potato. That’s on the theoretical side. On the practical side if you count your words according to what’s in the dictionary then we are clearly in the approaching-a-million zone. But you shouldn’t count your words that way. There is a practical boundary to the number of words, but it’s “usage by people” boundary not the “number of pages available” boundary. That “usage by people” number is pretty hard to get a measure on.

But 24/7 isn’t so hard. The word twenty itself was originally two words from Germanic roots; two tens. Well, that’s the modern English version anyway. In Old English ten was tich or tig. According to the American Heritage Dictionary both two and ten go back to Indo-European.

Someone asked me the other day why we in English say twenty four when in other languages they might say four and twenty. I’m not sure there is a concrete answer to this other than that love thing I mentioned; it’s preference. It turns out that in Old English people did say four and twenty, or more accurately four and twentieth (or even more accurately feower & twentigra – and I can’t get any more accurate with this character set). It was sometime around Shakespeare when English speakers took on the habit of putting the larger number first in the phrase, and it seems that it was just because they liked it better that way.

Before I go I wanted to tell you a little story about my book. You know the name of the book is Carnal Knowledge, A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology and Trivia. When I first wrote the thing I had a title all picked out and that title was Body Words, a Playful Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology and Trivia. But my agent, bless her heart, she came up with the new name. Now you know the Carnal Knowledge is a pretty technical term meaning “the sex act”, and sometimes an illegal sex act. So at first my reaction was that if I was walking through a book store and saw a book called Carnal Knowledge, I’d walk right by it. But then I thought, if two people pick it up for everyone who walks by it, I guess that’s the point, so I went with it.

Months or in fact years go by and finally my book is on bookstore shelves. I’ve gotten lots of good reaction but listen to the review I got on Amazon. I should thank the reviewer for being the first to put in a review, she signs herself as “nana of 6″ and she did give me the full five stars, but she titled the review: Don’t Judge a Book by it’s Cover, and she says

Great fun and interesting information BUT the pictures on the cover (implying it’s just a mundane sexual romp) stop me from giving it to my Grandkids and others who would love the content.

There’s more. I got this note from a listener Michelle

Picked up my copy of Carnal Knowledge this afternoon at Chapters [that's the Canadian book chain]. They had placed it in the ‘Sexuality and Well Being’ section

And now here’s another note from listener Kathleen

We thought you should know that when my husband went looking for your book he found it in the “Sexuality” section of our local Chapters. The clerk was reluctant to take him to that section but he insisted and there it was. So, when we were at another Chapters later this week we checked and sure enough, your book was shelved in “Sexuality.” We asked the clerk to move it and she did after checking her computer and found it should have been in the dictionary section.

So I don’t know if this teaches me a lesson or not. But it does mean that if you don’t see it in your local bookstore, they might have shelved it with the naughty books.