How many words are there in english
How many words are there in english
How many words are there in english
There is no exact count of the number of words in English, and one reason is certainly because languages are ever expanding; in addition, their boundaries are always flexible. Consider such words as «cannoli» and «teriyaki,» which come from other tongues but are established through use, context, and frequency as English. There are many other thorny considerations that complicate the task of counting individual words and tallying up the language in that way. For example, are all of the inflected forms of a wordfor instance, «drive,» «drives,» «drove,» etc.one word or several separate words?
Similarly, there are twelve different words with the spelling «post» entered in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged; they all have different parts of speech or derivations. Should these twelve be considered one word for the purposes of our reckoning? Some scholars would insist the distinct forms of «post» only be counted once, but others consider each one a separate word that should be counted individually.
Another puzzle: should «port of call,» another Webster’s Third entry, count as a word, even though each of its components is entered separately?
It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly 1 million words (although most linguists would take that estimate with a chunk of salt, and some have said they wouldn’t be surprised if it is off the mark by a quarter-million); that tally includes the myriad names of chemicals and other scientific entities. Many of these are so peripheral to common English use that they do not or are not likely to appear even in an unabridged dictionary.
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number.
Oxford English and Spanish Dictionary, Synonyms, and Spanish to English Translator
There is no single sensible answer to this question. It’s impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it’s so hard to decide what actually counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning ‘a kind of animal’, and a verb meaning ‘to follow persistently’)? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (e.g. dogs = plural noun, dogs = present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog?
It’s also difficult to decide what counts as ‘English’. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Teenage slang? Abbreviations?
The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989, contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don’t take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).
This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.
How many words are in the English language?
Many people estimate that there are more than a million words in the English language. In fact, during a project looking at words in digitised books, researchers from Harvard University and Google in 2010, they estimated a total of 1,022,000 words and that the number would grow by several thousand each year. When you see a massive number like this, though, it’s important to remember that this includes different forms of the same word. It also includes lots of words that we could call archaic (they are not used in modern English).
In the second edition of the Oxford English dictionary, there are approximately 600,000 word forms defined. Again, this includes many old-fashioned words that are not in common use any more. The dictionary also expands every year to keep up with new words that are invented to describe the world around us, or to include new meanings for words that already exist in English. A more useful number from the Oxford English Dictionary would be the 171,476 words that are in current use. That means there are examples of each of these words being used recently.
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That’s still a lot of words, though, and doesn’t reflect the number of words that English speakers actually use. For that number, let’s look at a recent study by the people at testyourvocab.com who say that most adult native-speakers of English have a vocabulary of 20,000-35,000 words. Obviously, these are not the same words and everyone’s vocabulary will include different words according to their career, education and interested.
So, let’s look back at the question. If we want to talk about how many words there are in English, there are three key numbers to remember: more than a million total words, about 170,000 words in current use, and 20,000-30,000 words used by each individual person.
How about you, though? How many words do you think you know and what are you doing to expand your vocabulary to the 20,000-30,000 that an English native speaker uses?
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How Many Words are in the English Language?
Many words in the English language are used very infrequently.
The number of words in the English language has also increased over the centuries, primarily due to:
People were discovering new ideas, places, and things. New words came about as a result.
The increased use of slang and jargon. Language and its usage evolves over time.
The influence of other languages. English “absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources,” including Latin.
In this article, we’ll be looking at how many words are in the English language. We’ll also look at how many words the average person knows. Finally, we’ll compare the number of words in English to the number of words found in other languages.
The English Dictionary
First, let’s look at how many words are in the Dictionary. The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use (and 47,156 obsolete words). Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. But, the number of words in the Oxford and Webster Dictionaries are not the same as the number of words in English.
Slang and Jargon
It’s impossible to determine how many words there are in the English language from the dictionary alone. First, it takes a while for dictionary publishers like Oxford University and Merriam-Webster to include new words in their dictionaries. Slang and jargon also exist. There are different slang terms. Some exist depending on where you live, and others are common in many places. One example of a common slang term is “frenemy,” a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy.”
Jargon, words used by people in a specific profession, also add to the volume of words used in the English language. For example, medical doctors will use their profession’s own terms when discussing patients. Computer programmers and IT specialists use computer jargon in their everyday work.
The Average Person
It’s safe to say that the average vocabulary of people is less than the total number of words in English. When you use the word counter in Google Docs to count the number of words you’ve typed in an essay, that number will only be a fraction of the total number of words in English. There is just no way that someone can know and use daily every word in the English language.
But, how many words does the average person know? Robert Charles Lee, a published writer, answers this question on Quora. He writes that “3,000 words will cover 95% of everyday writing — common texts and speech like newspapers, blogs, most books, movies, etc.” Out of those 3000 words, only “the first 1,000 words are used in 89% of everyday writing.” R.L.G at The Economist states that based on test results at TestYourVocab.com, “most adult native test-takers range from 20,000–35,000 words.”
Other Languages
Now, let’s compare English to other languages to see which language has the most words. English has always been influenced by other languages. It originally shared “much of its grammar and basic vocabulary” with Dutch and German. Later on, it took words from French and Latin. Per the Linguistic Society of America, there are about “6,909 distinct languages” in the world. Most of those languages belong to groups “of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another.” English belongs to the “Indo-European family.” Other languages in this family include Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, and French.5 There are more, but for now, we’ll compare English to those five.
Here is how the number of words in the Oxford Dictionary—171,476 in current use—compares to the number of words in those five other languages. The figures here are taken from the Lingholic website, which base their numbers on the largest dictionary for each language.
Spanish has about 100,000 words in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española.
German has about 135,000 words in the Der Duden dictionary.
200,000 Russian words exist in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian.
Italian has 270,000 in the Grande dizionario Italiano dell’uso.
French has 100,000 words but 350,000 definitions in the Le Grand Robert de la langue Française.
Just like it’s hard to know the number of words in English, it is also difficult to pinpoint how many words are in those five other languages. Slang and jargon exist in Spanish, German, Russian, Italian and French as well. Just like in English-speaking countries, there are professions in countries that speak one of those five other languages that use jargon.
What about “’agglutinative’ languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of ‘words?’” As such, these languages will have more words than English. For example, according to this article by Oxford Dictionaries, the Japanese and Korean languages both contain about 500,000 words.
In summary, the number of words in the English language is constantly changing. As new words become part of the vernacular, other words become obsolete. While it is good to know as many words as possible and continuously build your vocabulary, the average person only needs to know a small percentage of words to get by. Per Lingholic, “by knowing 1.75% of the English dictionary, you’ll be able to understand 95% of what you read.”
How Many Words Are There In The English Language?
How many words are in the English language? It would seem like a simple question, but the answer is anything but.
New words are entering the language all the time. In 2019, no one could have predicted what has become a defining word of 2020: COVID-19. At the same time, existing words evolve. What’s the first thing that comes to mind with tweet? A bird or social media? Old words fall out of use, and we don’t just mean Shakespeare’s methinks. What do we do with VHS or MySpace? And slang words come and go. Do we count VSCO girl as a word if it ends up not sticking around?
To boot, English loves loanwords: is it time to count despacito as an English word? What about nonce words—those one-off, made-up, throwaway words that are perfectly understandable in the moment? Say, snacktabulous. What’s more, now we have hashtags (#MeToo) and emoji (Face With Tears of Joy 😂)—do these count as words?
Linguistically speaking, all these questions only scratch the surface. So, how many words are in the English language? Perhaps the best short answer is: more words than you’ll ever use. But, let’s try to narrow it down a bit more than that.
What even is a word, anyways?
The answer to this question is hotly debated in linguistics. A word can be defined as a “unit of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation, that functions as a principal carrier of meaning.”
Take run. It’s a simple, basic word, right? But take a second to list its different word forms: runs, running, ran. Do these count as separate words in our total? Or should we just count the umbrella lexeme run? A lexeme is “a lexical unit in a language, as a word or base; vocabulary item.” The lexeme of running is considered run.
The idea of a lexeme, or one vocabulary item, brings us to phrases: Black Lives Matter, emotional support animal, pre-main sequence stars. We think of them as units, but do we count them as single words?
And what about the loanwords we mentioned above? Casa is part of English, but do we count vamonos? You’d be hard-pressed to find a native speaker of English who doesn’t know casa means “house.” It’s been naturalized from Spanish, meaning it’s been “introduced or adopted (foreign practices, words, etc.) into a country or into general use.” Should we consider vamonos (“let’s go”) an English word?
Then there are variants (“a different spelling, pronunciation, or form of the same word”). Do doughnuts and donuts count? (When it comes to doughnuts, we tend to think the more the merrier.) More importantly, what about dialects and nonstandard forms (e.g., ain’t) that historically have not been “counted” as words?
English is, of course, spoken around the world. Speakers of American English may not recognize terms common in world Englishes, such as South African English or Indian English. Do you know what spondulicks (British), jol (South African), or chuddies (Indian) mean?
English is a Germanic language, related to German, Dutch, Yiddish, and the like. They share some core structures, vocabulary, and sounds. Many of the most frequently used words in English are Germanic (not German) in origin, but over half its vocabulary is derived from Latin (much through French). Over the years, English has been influenced by and adopted words from various languages, and today, it contains words from hundreds of different languages. These words are estimated to make up about 80% of the English language.
How many words are in the dictionary?
Thinking about the number of words in the English language brings up the inevitable question: why can’t we just count up the words in a dictionary to get the answer?
For one thing, dictionaries are limited by space; for another, dictionaries count words in different ways and therefore differ in the number of entries they have. Dictionaries include headwords (also called lemmas) that a lot of people consider to be, authoritatively, words, but these also include prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, and other word forms and elements—many of which we don’t necessarily think of or categorize as words.
Dictionaries also differ in scope and audience. For example, there are learner’s dictionaries, for those who need to know the basics of a language, and scientific dictionaries that have those specific terms that only, say, a forensic nephrologist (membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis, anyone?) would ever use. That means each dictionary will have a different number of headwords, with some words appearing in multiple dictionaries while other highly technical words do not.
In general, unabridged dictionaries generally include over 300,000 entries, depending on how the dictionary counts an “entry”—and we’re back to the same thorny question about the different versions of run and all its inflections, or “change in the shape of a word, generally by affixation.”
Today, online dictionaries allow us to enter and document English like never before! This allows dictionaries to keep growing and expanding beyond their published editions.
What can we learn from corpora? (And what does that word mean, anyways?)
Digital technology lets us capture words like never before, too. A corpus is yet another way to capture a snapshot of the English language. Corpus most commonly refers to a large or comprehensive collection of creative works, such as all of the writings of a particular author. The word is used in a more specific way in linguistics to refer to an entire set of a particular linguistic element within a language, such as words.
One popular corpus is the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which contains more than 1 billion words drawn from magazines, TV shows, blogs, and more sources, but these include multiple instances of the same word. According to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks language usage trends, the English language currently tops a whopping 1 million distinct words.
Included in such English language lists are tons and tons of scientific words that many of us don’t know but, of course, still qualify as words. They’re intimidating (think recombinant tissue plasminogen activator, electroencephalogram, and ohmmeter), but they are understood by someone—or maybe even two or three someones!