How Many Words Are There in the English Language?

There is no certain answer of “How Many Words Are There in the English Language?” 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number Of Words in the English Language

  • The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (OED2) includes over 600,000 definitions.
  • The Global Language Monitor announced that the English language had crossed the 1,000,000-word threshold on 10 June 2009.
  • The announcement was met with strong scepticism by linguists and lexicographers, though a number of non-specialist reports accepted the figure uncritically. However, in December 2010 a joint Harvard/Google study found the language to contain 1,022,000 words and was expanding at the rate of 8,500 words per year.

 


3 Comments

  1. Jim Bare August 5, 2011
  2. princebapnah September 7, 2011
  3. arieanna September 8, 2011

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