Why search for your “inner child” when there’s an “inner diva” to explore?

And with fewer people riding horses, many refer to “free reign” rather than “free rein,” even if no monarch is in sight, according to Oxford University dictionary researchers.

After six years of labor, linguists have now fed the billionth word into a database as part of an Oxford University Press project designed to track how English is developing in the 21st century. The project looks at which words appear together most often as “collocates,” or in conjunction.

Among the findings: “Men” tend to “assault,” “hijack,” “grin,” “brandish” or “stagger,” while “women” are more apt to “sob,” “cohabit” or “gossip.”

“We’re not saying that’s the way people necessarily behave, but this is typical” in the language, Catherine Soanes, one of the project’s lexicographers, said.

The researchers have found many variations on the term “inner child.” They include, in this order, “inner geek,” “inner nerd,” “inner diva” and “inner dweeb.”

The word “chic” appears in phrases such as “geek chic,” “heroin chic,” “shabby chic” and “retro chic.” Words have been fed into the project’s database since Jan. 1, 2000.

A bad cause

The Oxford University Press, which publishes the 20-volume historical Oxford English Dictionary of some 615,000 words, is conducting the research to update such volumes as the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and the Pocket Oxford English Dictionary. Researchers vacuumed up the billion words by using Internet-crawling software to search academic papers, newspapers and corporate literature, as well as chat rooms and blogs. The billion include many repeated words.

“It helps us find things about the language we haven’t found before,” said Soanes.

The word “cause,” for example, is often defined as to make something happen, “but it’s actually used to make something negative happen, as with accidents or deaths or quite nasty things,” she said. The word’s definition in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary now says: “Make (something, especially something bad) happen.”

‘Free reign’

Many traditional phrases are giving way to alternative terms, the project found. While “free rein” is still used in 54 percent of references, “free reign” now accounts for 46 percent of usage. The term “vocal cords” beats “vocal chords” by a diminishing margin of 51 percent to 49 percent.

Is the Oxford English Dictionary endorsing misspellings based on false associations?

“We don’t make any value judgment about spelling,” said Soanes. “Spelling has never been fixed. It’s always been changing. We have this historical feeling that ‘free reign’ is wrong, but we’re seeing 46 percent doing it. ‘Free reign’ is not going into the dictionary yet, but it may one day take a variant place in the dictionary.”

The increased popularity of “free reign” and “vocal chords” probably starts with people making familiar connections. “People don’t ride horses nowadays, but they’re familiar with a queen’s reign,” Soanes said. “It’s the same with ‘vocal chord.’ People know a ‘chord’ in music, and make the connection.”

In some cases, newer variations have entered the Oxford dictionaries, including “straight-laced,” which is now used 66 percent of the time compared with 34 percent for the traditional “strait-laced.”

Fests and tastics

Finally, a word about endings. “One of the trends in the language is compounding,” Soanes said.

The suffix “fest,” to describe an excess, is most commonly used in “slugfest,” “lovefest” and “gabfest,” the project found.

Other most-used suffixes include “tastic,” as in “poptastic,” “funktastic” and “fabtastic.”

And then there’s “ville,” which is most often used in “nowheresville,” “splitsville” and “dumpsville.”