When Chris Evans launched a short story competition for children on BBC Radio 2 called 500 Words, he probably had no idea that it would take off with such vigour. Or that it would be attract the scrutiny of lexicographers at Oxford University Press who have, for the second year, language-crunched the words into some fascinating data.
This year, more than 90,000 youngsters entered their stories, using a mind-boggling 40 million words. By far the most popular is Mum with over 115,000 occurrences and regional variations, including mom and mam. Poor dad only just scrapes into the Top 15, although he does star as an action man in several of the Top 50 shortlisted stories – fighting aliens, exploding, and building a time machine! Good on you boys!
Children continue to show their fascination with fairy tales and magic – dragons, monsters, giants, fairies and wizards dominate the character base, except for our faithful friend the dog, which appears 25,000 times. Familiar characters include Cinderella, Bella Swan, Katniss Everdeen (from Twilight and The Hunger Games), Harry Potter and James Bond. The boys from One Direction are mentioned a fair bit while television shows are represented through Tracy Beaker, Doctor Who, EastEnders and Britain’s Got Talent.
Creating words is still a priority for our budding bards and some of the best fabdabidabulous, the lumbagain (‘a ghost who makes people dull and boring’) and dulbodogfragonaffe (‘a very big animal with the head of a duck and the mane of a lion, plus the neck of a giraffe and the body of a horse…’).
The longest word, at a whopping 36 letters, is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia – which is a real word and, of course, means fear of long words! From here, the use of vocabulary remains strong and varied. Impressive adjectives include altitudinous, antediluvian, atramentous and melanistic, whilst imaginative similes and metaphors abound.
Vineeta Gupta, Head of Children’s Dictionaries at Oxford University Press says “Children are true innovators with words and language and have produced such creative and powerful stories. It is wonderful to see how children are taking traditional themes, words and stories and transforming them into tales for the 21st century audience. We poured the millions of words used by the young writers into our language cauldron and ‘magicked’ up a whole host of fascinating findings that will shine a light on our children’s language research in the future.”
Chris Evans says “I was staggered to find out we’d received over 90,000 entries for this year’s 500 WORDS competition. The creativity of these awesome authors knows no bounds – we have dragons, monsters, wizards, space-ships – and some of these super story-tellers are even inventing new words. Inspirational or what?”
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