As regular readers of English Today would probably be aware, in the early years of the 21st Century, when applied linguists discuss the world-wide significance of the most widely learned and used language, it is not always enough to simply refer to it as ‘English’ or ‘the English language’. On the contrary, it has become almost de rigueur to collocate the word ‘English’ with ‘world’, ‘international’ or ‘global’. Thus, we have the six commonly used expressions set out in Table 1. At the risk of adding further to the crowded landscape of abbreviations in applied linguistics, I will refer to these as ‘CEWIGs’ (Collocations of ‘English’ with ‘world’, ‘international’ and ‘global’).