How many words in english language

How Many Words in English?

In order to estimate the number of words in a language, one must first determine what a word is.

For example, is bug a word? Or is it several words? There’s bug “insect,” bug as in, “I drive a Bug,” bug as in “Don’t bug me,” bug as in “eyes that bug out,” and bug as in “Ain’t you the big bug?” Then, there are inflected forms: bugs, bugged, bugging, buggy (crawling with bugs), and debug.

One way to determine the number of words in English is to count the number of entries in a dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary contains entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. Add to these about 9,500 derivative words that are included as subentries. According the OED blog, these numbers add up to about a quarter of a million distinct English words.

Another way to count words is with an algorithm. The Global Language Monitor (GLM) keeps a running total with something called a Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI). The PQI runs analytics as a weighted index, measuring the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media, on the Internet, and in proprietary databases like Lexis-Nexis. When a word or phrase meets a minimum of 25,000 citations and certain geographical criteria, it is added to the total. On June 10, 2009, the total reached the million mark with Web 2.0. Since then, about 14,000 words have been added. According to the GLM, a new word is created every 98 minutes, or about 14.7 per day. Some of these words, however, are of questionable use to most speakers, for example, jai ho!, N00b, carbon neutral, greenwashing, chengguan, recessionists, and zombie banks.

Whether one estimates the number of words at 250,000 or a million, English leads all other languages in vocabulary size. For example, the number of words in French is estimated to be 100,000; German, 184,000; Chinese, about 86,000. Individual speakers, of course, get along just fine in the 10,000-50,000-word range.

In 1930, linguist Charles Ogden proposed a form of English that uses only 850 words and a few rules. George Orwell used it as a model for Newspeak. Ogden’s word list is still used for ESL instruction.

Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that as few as 1,000 words are enough to navigate daily life–if they’re the right words. Utility, not quantity, is what matters in vocabulary. My observations of the language used on Facebook for example, suggest that most people get along with very few words indeed, especially modifiers.

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5 Responses to “How Many Words in English?”

Don’t forget the relatively small language “Dutch” that has
quote
The largest monolingual dictionary in the world, it contains over 430,000 entries for Dutch words from 1500 to 1921. The paper edition consists of 43 volumes

It is endless, because we can keep combining words

Best regards,
Wim

Utility not quantity. It’s with that thought I take up the challenge. My home language is English, but that’s all I can lay claim to – not to quality, and it’s for this reason I subscribe.
Perhaps some of the pain will go away, when faced with small increments of knowlege..
Bruce

I am sure that many of my elementary and high school friends hated our English classes for one reason or another. Perhaps the classes were boring or redundant or too difficult at times. And perhaps they figured they could get by on 1000 words. But I will not forget my 9th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Bar-Chama, and our vocabulary workbooks. I don’t remember the frequency with which she made us use those books, because our English classes consisted of more than just vocabulary lessons. But the books were filled with page after page of word lists; we had to look up each word and write the definition, then use the word in a sentence. There was no rhyme or reason to the contents of any given list; the words were not particularly related in any way or grouped for similar difficulty or popularity. IIRC, we had pop quizzes. A large chunk of my vocabulary now goes back to those books, and even if I don’t use those words on a daily–or yearly–basis, I recognize them and understand them in context when I see them. Thank you, Mrs. B, wherever you are 🙂

@the: Excellent point. I agree that learning words and their meanings is a great gift, and one that usually goes unappreciated till later in life than high school. Personally, I think using a large but not overly pedantic vocabulary has benefited me more in my life than being a look-a-like for Cary Grant. OK, a lot more. I really do have a pretty good vocabulary 🙂

I wouldn’t presume to give parenting advice to anyone but I am always passing on words to my son, e.g. Just the other day, I was reading an article somewhere (maybe on DWT?) that used the word chimera in its figurative sense. I popped it into an email and sent it to him with just a short note, something like., “this is a really good word to know.” Me being me, of course, I also stressed how it is properly pronounced. I don’t know if he already knew the word– he’s 19 and articulate– but I thought it can’t hurt. Who knows, maybe someday he’ll be in a position where knowing that word really pays off for him, sets him apart in beneficial way, etc. Just my little pat on my own back. LOL.

How Many Words Are There in the English Language?

There is no way to truly answer this question; however, one can figure out a rough estimate.

Numerous experts figured out that the English language is comprised of more than a million words. In reality, researchers from Harvard University and Google in 2010 estimated that there are 1,022,000 English words and that number could grow by about 8,500 every year. When you see a substantial number like this, it is very crucial to keep in mind that this contains different sorts of identical words. It likewise has lots of words that we might call antiquated. In other words, phrases that are no longer used in contemporary English.

Table of Contents

How Many Words Are There in English?

In the Oxford English dictionary, there are about 600,000-words that are defined in the English language. Once more, this consists of several antique words that are not in daily use any longer. This dictionary increases yearly to stay on top of new terms created to clarify new material around us or include new meaning to important words that already exist in English.

A much different number from the Oxford English dictionary would be the 171,476 words currently related to people in specific professions. These are not precisely the same words in the overall dictionary. These pertain to people’s profession, education, and passions.

It’s also difficult to establish what counts as English. The Oxford English Thesaurus of 1989 includes full definitions for 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 out-of-date words. Another 9,500 words could be added to this as subentries. Over fifty percent of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and also verbs; the remainder comprised of exclamations, mixes, prepositions, suffixes, and so on. The point is, there are over a quarter million new words in English and over a half million worldwide. If there was a more defined way to count, the total would perhaps resemble three-quarters of a million.

An Ever-Expanding Vocabulary

New words can enter into the language at any time. In 2019, no individual could have forecasted what has ended up being a defining word of 2020: COVID-19. At the same time, this term is here to stay. Another new concept is when you hear the term Tweets and all the words associated with this new terminology. Old words fall away; for example, we don’t use Shakespearean language anymore.

The introduction to lexemes, or a family of related terms, brings us to expressions like Black Lives Matter and emotional support pet. We think about them as systems, yet do we count them as singular words?

Where the English Language Came From

English is a Germanic language with many German and Dutch terminology. They share some core structures, vocabulary, as well as sound. A number of the most regularly used terms in English are Germanic; however, over half the vocabulary is stemmed from Latin and French. Throughout the years, English has been influenced by and welcomed words from various languages, and even today, it has words from many different languages. These words make up about 80% of the English language. When it comes to English, we have a vast number of terms from various places.

Some people think, why isn’t as simple as counting the words in a thesaurus? Unfortunately, the thesaurus doesn’t have enough space. The thesaurus includes key terms that a lot of individuals take to be partial words. Nonetheless, these partial words are prefixes, suffixes, and various other word types which are parts of words. We do not always think about or classify these affixes as words, but some of them can be words of their own.

Furthermore, thesaurus’ differs from one another depending on the target audience. For instance, the student’s thesaurus, for those who need to recognize the principles of a language, and scientific thesaurus with those specific terms that only deal with forensic would certainly be different. That indicates each thesaurus will have a different variety of words, with some words turning up in countless dictionaries while various other overly technical words do not.

Today, online thesaurus enable us to search as well as record English words freely. The thesaurus makes it possible for synonym replacement phrases to keep growing.

Digital development allows us to capture a collection of phrases like never before. A corpus is yet a different method to envision the English language. A corpus most regularly explains a substantial or detailed collection of imaginative phrases, to grammatically describe a whole set of particular etymological within a language. In other words, we are able to go online and read the different books with different genres.

The Vocabulary of an Individual

It’s safe to claim that the individual’s typical vocabulary is less than the complete range of English words. There is just no other way to identify and use day-to-day words in the English language.

According to some research, the ordinary 20-year-old English speaker uses around 42,000 words. In a 2011 conference with the BBC, lexicographer Susie Dent estimated that while an English speaker may identify around 40,000 words, they proactively utilize 20,000 of them.

The reality is English-speaking adults use between 20,000 and 30,000 words. The good news is that they are probably able to recognize additional words when reading by using context clues.

Conclusion

All in all, how many words are there in the English language? One famous corpus is the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which consists of more than one billion words drawn from publications, TV programs, blog websites, and many more sources. Yet, these consist of numerous variations of the same specific word. According to the Worldwide Language Display, which tracks language usage patterns, the English language currently covers a massive one million distinctive words.

Contained in such English language listings are bunches and many clinical words that many do not acknowledge yet, naturally, still certify as words. They’re daunting; nevertheless, they are part of the working life of some people.

How many words are there in English? We can only make an educated guess. Words are regularly added and modified, so it would be difficult to choose an ever-evolving number.

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How Many Words Are In the English Language?

How Many Words Are In the English Language 2022?

Every person who is interested in learning English probably thought about this question at some point – how many words are in the English language? It’s hard to get a clear answer simply by opening a dictionary, so let’s delve into curious world of English and research this topic together.В
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Amount of English terms people know and use can be drastically different for various historical periods, stratum of society, etc. There will also be quite a gap between the number of words people use in their day-to-day lives, as opposed to those that we encounter in literature.В

How Many Words Are In the English Dictionary?

This question is perhaps even harder to answer than the one about the total number of English terms. Every dictionary is different – they have varying capacities, differently recognize what constitutes a word, have different release dates. Plus, neologisms are created every day. Just think about it – English vocabulary received numerous new entries due to 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, including peculiar novelty terms such as “covidiot” and “WFH” (an acronym for “work from home”). Therefore, when it comes to pinpointing the number of words in an English dictionary, we should consult with a few well-known and authoritative sources.В

Merriam-Webster online dictionary informs its readers that their latest official edition includes approximately 470,000 entries. Main page of Oxford English Dictionary official website states that they cover over 600,000 terms. At the same time, latest published edition of Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary offers its readers information about over 60,000 words. In its turn, Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has approximately 140,000 entries. Collins English Dictionary covers a whopping number of words – 750,000. Additionally, if we consult Wikipedia, we find out that their English Wiktionary includes about 520,000 words.В

As we see, the question about the amount of words in English dictionary is a tricky one, because there are hundreds of online and published books that people use. Amount of terms they cover varies depending on many factors, including a year of publishing, as well as book of word meanings type. Even if you know all the words from an average English dictionary, sometimes it’s not enough. There are cases when fluency doesn’t guarantee proper translation. If you need a certified translation done professionally, contact USCIS translation services. В

How Many Words in the English Language Are Slang and Jargon?В

If common words are hard to put a number on, you can only imagine how abundant modern slang is and how much bulk it adds to present-day English language. To start with, dictionaries define “slang” differently. For instance, Merriam-Webster states that it can be used about informal and niche-specific words, while Collins dictionary adds that slang terms are commonly used by people who are very familiar with each other. Although terms «slang» and «jargon» are often used interchangeably, the latter is commonly defined a bit differently, as specific technical, hybrid, or simplified terms which are often used by people of the same group, profession, or in association with a specific activity, for example, a type of sport.

Jargon

Jargon often prevents people from performing a high-quality document translation. Medical document translation services and translators who work in a specific field are aware of special terms or abbreviations that an average person will fail to translate right. How many words in English dictionary are literary? Surely, we often use words like “bummer”, “lame”, “chill”, “ripped” and countless others, but although it’s hard to imagine excluding them from our vocabulary, you’re unlikely to discover them in printed vocabularies. While those are not literary terms, they often help us convey a specific idea or meaning that is hard to deliver in dictionary terms.

Slang

When people attempt translating from a language they are not very familiar with, slang terms often are the biggest challenge. In these cases contacting a professional may be the best choice, especially when it comes to extra-difficult languages. You can rely on these Mandarin translation services if you need a good Chinese translation.

As you can imagine, there is no conclusive number of slang words in English language. Because of globalization, mass media, traveling, and other factors modern languages are more exposed to one another than ever before, which leads to word borrowing and the creation of many neologisms. Every language is dynamic, it changes every second, bringing us novelty phrases and peculiar terms we can incorporate into our lexicon to enrich it and make communication more easy and fun.

Number of Words in English Language Comparing To Other Languages

Global language monitoring website estimates that there are over a million English words, and authoritative resources like Merriam-Webster tend to agree. Of course, most of them are terms that our day-to-day communication is devoid of for different reasons – including archaic terms, words specific to a certain science, or a different part of the world.В

Comparing to other languages, English has an edge when it comes to word count, being the lingua franca (a.k.a. common language) of modern world. Let’s see how many words does the English language have in comparison to world’s commonly used languages.

Italian

According to authoritative Italian dictionary Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, there are about 260,000 words in Italian. Dictionary Devoto Oli in its turn estimates that there are about 100,000 Italian terms, while another commonly used dictionary Zingarelli counts about 145,000 words.В

Spanish

Spanish language has over 300,000 words, although their number will depend on the source we consult. Thus, The Collins Spanish Dictionary contains 130,000 words, El Diccionario de La Real Academia EspaГ±ola has 93,000 entries, El Diccionario de Americanismos counts 70,000 entries, while El Diccionario HistГіrico de la Lengua EspaГ±ola has about 150,000 entries, including archaisms and obsolete terms.

French

Most French books of word meanings estimate the number of words to be around 60,000, but Le Grand Robert de la langue FranГ§aise has around 100,000 entries. Other dictionaries provide other data – Le Larousse counts 59,000 French terms, while Le LittrГ© counts 132,000 commonly used French terms.В

Russian

Now as you know how many words are there in the English language, Russian, in comparison, has only about 150,000 words. Russian dictionaries don’t usually include jargon, archaic or specialized terms. For example, Dal’s Explanatory Dictionary counts 200,000 entries, while The Large Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language counts 130,000 entries.

German

German dictionaries cover different amounts of words, too. For example, latest edition of Rechtschreibdudens counts about 148,000 terms, while Deutsche Wörterbuch has about 450,000. That said, modern German vocabulary counts about 300,000-400,000 words.

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English Speakers’ Average Vocabulary

You may wonder how many words in English language constitute an average vocabulary. Science magazine states that modern 20 y.o. US citizen possesses a vocabulary of approximately 42,000 terms, which is confirmed by UPI’s research. In its turn, The Economist reports that adult Americans know about 30,000 words.В

For those who still learn English, these numbers seem unsurmountable. But don’t be discouraged! Experts say that you need only 5,000-10,000 words to be proficient. If your English is not sufficient yet, you can use online translation services for any of your linguistic needs. Such services can be of great help while you work on your vocabulary.

This is Getting Wordy

As you see, the number of words in the English language is beyond tricky to determine. It can be confusing, but you should remember that different dictionaries include (or disregard) various terms based on their own criteria – they can even define the term “word” differently! For some books of word meanings, archaic or novelty terms don’t make the cut, while others choose to include them. All in all, there’s no finite number of English words – modern lexicon fluctuates and changes daily.

How Many Words in the English Language?

The English language is quite fascinating. Did you know that the average person only uses around half of the tokens that they know and recognize in everyday communications? So how many tokens are there in a language? For translation to or from English, talk to a competent multilingual translator; many offer online service provision, too.

How Many Words are there in the English language?

Learning and translating English is no small feat; the Oxford Dictionary currently contains over 170,000 tokens currently used by English-speakers. This is in comparison to other languages, such as Spanish and French which each has around 100,000 tokens in their native tongue. It should be mentioned that Russian has over 200,000 tokens currently in their diction, while Italians use a total of around 270,000 tokens. Know, however, that most people use and recognize a mere fraction of the total tokens in their primary vernacular; so how many do most know, on average?

How Many Words in the Vocabulary Does the Average Person Know?

Most speakers regularly use an average of 20,000, though they may have a passive vocabulary of around twice that number. A passive vocabulary refers to tokens that they recognize and know, but that they don’t use in everyday conversation.

How Many Words Start With X?

There are a lot of tokens that are relatively rare that begin with the letter ‘x’ is one of these. In fact, there are not many that even contain the letter ‘x and many are names of people, places, and events. The Oxford Dictionary lists around 400 that begin with x, though online dictionaries only document around 120.

How Many Words in the English Language Contain Two Consecutive Letter U’s?

What about consecutive vowels? Are there any that contain two consecutive u’s? Yes, this is an odd and infrequently occurring vocabulary phenomena, but it does happen. In most cases, those with consecutive u’s have Latin roots. Among these with two consecutive u’s are:

The word ‘muumuu’ is a distinct case as it actually comes from Hawaii and refers to a loose-fitting, traditional dress.

How Many Words in English End in Dous?

‘Wordies’ and ‘Scrabble’ players may also wonder this: are there any that end with ‘dous’? The next time a crossword puzzle has you stumped or you are trying to find that perfect word, consider one of only four words in common use that contain the suffix ‘dous’:

Any zoologists in the house? There is also the word apodous, which refers to wildlife that doesn’t have feet, in the traditional sense. You can now consider apodous to be part of your passive vocabulary!

How Many Words in the English Language Don’t Have an E?

When you consider the vernacular, what is the most popular letter? It seems that there are few tokens that don’t contain the letter ‘e’ but in actuality, there are 243,744 that do not contain the letter ‘e’. These range in length from two-to-45 letters. Wondering about that word without any e’s that is 45 letters long? The word is ‘Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg’ and it is a term used to describe the earliest discovered lakes in this country, often being translated to mean lake divided by islands by the Native Americans that first coined this term.

Another interesting fact is that e is the most common letter, and when it is missing from a word, name, or event, it impacts all of the other letters surrounding it. This is probably most prevalent and easy to explain with historical literature; have you seen the many ways that the letter ‘e’ appears in plays, sonnets, and other great works? It can be challenging to construct any literary piece without the invaluable letter ‘e’ and leaving it out greatly changes the message and meaning. It is that simple.

How Many Words Contain the Letter Z?

Another vocabulary puzzle that stumps many is when they need to come up with a word starting with- or even containing- the letter ‘z’. ‘Z’ is often underestimated and underutilized, but truth be told, there are actually around 32,913 words containing the letter ‘z’.

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How Many Words are in English?

Words are Spoken.

The question, «How many words are there in English?» is based on a misunderstanding of language. It is based on the false assumptions that (1) words are objects that someone creates and (2) stores in a published dictionary. Neither assumption is true. Words that are simply spoken but never published do not enter dictionaries. That does not mean that they are not words, for language is a spoken medium, not a written one. 3,312 of the world’s roughly 7111 living languages and dialects have writing systems, most of these created only for translations of the Bible. If words were the things found in dictionaries, the majority of the world’s languages would have no words.

In point of fact, all languages are equipped to produce however many words are necessary for communication either internally, by derivation rules (lawyer > lawyerly) and compounding (water + fall > waterfall), or externally, by borrowing from other languages. So, one answer to the question in the title is: the number of possible words in any language at any given moment is infinite, for there is no limit on the number of possible words in any human language. However, we may distinguish between possible and actual words, so how many actual words are there in English?

Dictionaries are Word Samplings.

Dictionaries are convenient samplings of a language’s vocabulary at a particular time and place. The problem here is that every dictionary contains a different number of words. You can certainly pick up any dictionary and find out how many words that dictionary samples. Usually, the approximate number of words contained in a dictionary is mentioned in the introduction. But compilers constantly make decisions as to whether to include this new word or exclude this old word based on arbitrary criteria such as space limitations, their memories, their attitudes as to whether it is commonly accepted or archaic, and their success in finding published sources. Click here for the number of words in the world’s largest English-language dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Words are Used at Particular Times.

Dictionaries try to be timely, so they sample words that their compilers consider current. It is difficult to ascertain the currency of a word since words used yesterday may not be used today. On the other hand, two or three people may use an archaic word no one else uses. I recall in high school using «whither», «whence», «thither», «thence», among my friends to the point that they became an integral part of my vocabulary. I can still use them correctly. (I impressed—and probably amused—one of my English professors at the University of North Carolina when I let one accidentally slip in a conversation with him during my freshman year.)

Think of all the words that have existed in the past but are no longer used: «spats», «isinglass», «antidisestablishmentarianism», «fro». We cannot say that these words no longer «exist» but only that they are no longer used. We are free to begin using them any time we wish and in writing historical works, they are used. In fact, we often encourage resurrecting archaic words in our Good Word feature for good reason.

Words are Used in Particular Places.

Dictionaries are convenient samplings of a language’s vocabulary from a particular place. English words are used in Australia and England that are not used in the U.S. One of alphaDictionary.com’s Words of the Day was «prepone», the obverse of «postpone». We announced it as the birth of a new word, since none of us here could find any evidence of it in the U.S. and the Canadian reader who sent it in assured us that it was new in Canada. But we received 4 messages from readers in India, assuring us that the word has been in use in India for at least 40 years!

For our Good Word feature at alphaDictionary.com, we even try to find regional words like «gazump», «daft», «smarmy» (England) and «dag», «billabong», «dinkum» (Australia and New Zealand) to emphasize this point. So, even if words «exist» in the English language, they may exist in one geographical location and not others. How do we count words like this?

Derivational Diversity. Suppose we needed a new verb and either borrowed or created «blunk» to suit the purpose. We have added one new word to the vocabulary of a segment of the English-speaking population, right? Well, what about «blunker» and «blunking» and «blunkable» and «blunkability» and «unblunkability» and «blunked» and so on which are immediately available to any speaker the moment they hear the word? Have you ever heard «unclickability»? It doesn’t appear in any dictionary but if we can «click» a hyperlink, can’t we talk about the «unclickability» of a dead link? Is it a word or not? Of course, it is but it will never be in a dictionary unless it picks up an unusual meaning.

How about these words: kohlrabian (person eating only kohlrabi), concarnivore (someone eating only dishes with meat in them), or pondist «someone who plays a pond as a musical instrument). There is absolutely no use for these words so they are never used. Does that mean that they are not words? Some words are simply «there», provided by rules of grammar. Some are spoken at a given moment and never spoken again. In fact, they are «there» whether they are used or not. How can you count them?

Do Words Exist at All?

This may surprise you. Dr. Goodword’s career before he came to Alpha Dictionary was based on arguing before the scientific community that there are no such things as words! His «Separation Hypothesis», now widely accepted in the linguistic community, claims that what we take as words are in fact two distinct phenomena: lexemes and morphemes. Lexemes are noun, verb, and adjective (adverb) stems like «word», «speak», and «friend». Morphemes are everything else, including suffixes like -y, -ness, -er, -ing, -ly, and prefixes like re-, un-, anti-.

When we speak, we do not always recall fully-formed words from our mental word storage (called a «lexicon») but rather lexemes. Before we utter them we have the option of adding morphemes (suffixes and prefixes). When we choose «word» we may say «word», or, by adding affixes, «wordy», or «wordiness», depending on what we want to express. We say «speaker» by recalling «speak» and adding -er to it.

So what is the difference between recalling «speaker» and recalling «speak» + «-er»? There are many differences between lexemes and morphemes but the most important one is that lexemes are always pronounced-affixes are not! Someone who runs is a runner, right? Someone who flies is a flyer. That is because run means «run» and «er» means «someone who» and when you put them together, runner should mean «someone who runs». But if this logic is true, what means «someone who» in (a) guide? Or (a) cook? Or (a) cheat? There are millions of such words across all languages reflecting a regular change in meaning but with no sound to account for it. Apparently, the meaning of a morpheme may be expressed without sound.

Another difference is that lexemes, nouns, verbs, and adjectives, refer to things in the real world («word», «speak», «red») while morphemes refer only to grammatical categories like «Past Tense, Plural Number, Agentive (a runner, a cook). No language has an inaudible lexeme. Morphemes, on the other hand, seem to function just as well inaudibly as audibly. This means that when we utter what we normally think of as «words», the brain is actually carrying out two distinct tasks: recalling the sound and meaning of lexemes and adding (or not) something quite different, morphemes. Current evidence now suggests that the two processes take place in two different parts of the brain.

This means that speaking is a tad more complicated than originally thought. In most instances we do simply recall a word and insert it into a sentence. However, if we want to, we can combine it with an audible or inaudible affix (prefix or suffix) to create a new word. (You may read more about this interesting new theory «There are no such Things as Words» in Dr. Goodword’s office.

Conclusion.

So speaking is not what it seems to be. We don’t simply memorize the words we know in our mental lexicons and keep the remainder in published dictionaries. First of all, we can create words on the spot whenever we need them by the two-step process mentioned above. We can use a foreign word if everyone understands it, even if it is never used again and never appears in a dictionary.

Second, dictionaries are samplings of published words at a given time in a given place. Dictionaries exist only among the small minority of the world’s languages with writing systems but all languages contain words (that is, lexemes and morphemes). Some claim that there are a half million actual words in English, others say there are a million, and still others claim the number is two million. All these numbers are dreamed up by the author of the claim have nothing to do with reality.

It is true that English borrows recklessly from virtually every language on earth. In fact, «borrow» may be too weak in speaking of English; we should say that English aggressively mugs other languages for their lexical treasure (see ‘Words: Where do they Come from?’ elsewhere in the library for details). We might just as well claim that the number of English words is equivalent to the number of words in all the Earth’s languages. That is as true as any other figure we could come up with by any means.

The very best attitude is to take another sip of your favorite wine, savor it with the words we have in our truly luxurious lexical storehouse, and never let the question in the title of this paper ever cross your mind again.