Prosper-Ase Language Centre

DO YOU KNOW...?
* how many words are in the English language?
* how many words the average person knows
* which language has the most words

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’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.

Source: https://englishlive.ef.com/blog/language-lab/many-words-english-language/

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.4 Out of those 3000 words, only the first 1,000 words are used in 89% of everyday writing.4 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

- ITALIAN: has 270,000 in the Grande dizionario Italiano dell’uso
- RUSSIAN: 200,000 words exist in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian.
- GERMAN:has about 135,000 words in the Der Duden dictionary.
- SPANISH: there are about 100,000 words in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española.
- FRENCH: 100,000 words, but 350,000 definitions in the Le Grand Robert de la langue Française.

(https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-are-in-the-english-language/)

English mysteries: how many words are in the English language?