How many words are there in the English language?
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M$3 Answers
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M$The Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 distinct words, as well as thousands that have become obsolete and are no longer in use. To add to that, new words are added to the dictionary each year (while others are removed), so the number of words continually changes.
If you were to count all of the different meanings of each word, the total could reach almost 3 million. So, depends on what your definition of a word is.
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M$
I wonder about your number. I used to have one of these that claimed to have 600,000+ "entries"
Amazon.com says
Amazon.com Review
"The Oxford English Dictionary has long been considered the ultimate reference work in English lexicography. . . . ,. By the time the last volume was published in 1928, the dictionary had swelled from 4 to 10 volumes containing over 400,000 entries. In the years since, the staff of the OED has continued to keep pace with our ever-evolving language, and today the dictionary weighs in at a whopping 20 volumes. The great joy of this dictionary lies in its extensive cross-references and word etymologies, which can run a full page or more. These features not only make the OED the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of the English language, but a delight to browse. "
That would make an estimate of 800,000 "Entries" not unreasonable.
There is a difference between "entries" and "distinct words." Different meanings or forms of the same word would be considered separate entries but a single distinct word. Also some acronyms, abbreviations, and proper nouns have entries, but may not be considered words. andy's source is from oxford so I would trust it, but it comes down to how you define an individual word
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 interjections,
conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no
account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as
noun and adjective).
wikianswers
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