Language changes more quickly than any other human activity. Language reflects and records all human change. If someone invents a new move on a snowboard, creates a new rhythm, markets a new computer game, or discovers a new species of beetle, that new thing will get a new name. Right now, language is evolving more rapidly than ever before, because people can share it so widely and so quickly. Television can reach out to billions of viewers, but computers allow billions of readers and writers to reach one another.
Philologists are delighted that the age of the Internet has been, so far, an age of texts.
Intake, change, growth, and reproduction mark language as a living system. Captured as computer files, millions and millions of words from all over the earth form a sort of verbal ecosystem. By studying words in this version of their natural habitat, the text, lexicographers can see much more than individual new words. They watch old words take on new meanings, join in new phrases, add or drop plural forms. And then they try to predict the future.