>How many words are there in English?
How many words are there in English and how many do you need to know to communicate?
Here you can find out how many words there are in English.
How many words are there in English?
This question is very popular among people learning English, since every student tries to expand his vocabulary to the maximum, and, naturally, sooner or later everyone asks the question: I wonder how many words there are in English?
In fact, no one will give you an exact answer to this question for the reason that there is no answer to it. If you look at different statistics, you may be surprised because the numbers can be different everywhere. This is because there are several methods for counting words. According to one, only words are counted, according to another, words and word forms, and according to the third, something else.
However, an organization has been founded in the United States that monitors the spread of English words. It is called Global Language Monitor (GLM). The tasks of this organization include counting words and monitoring the emergence of new language formations. GLM works with generally accepted dictionaries and also monitors the emergence of new words in the media, social networks, and literature.
According to the latest data from this organization, in the English language there are 1,019,729 words.
Moreover, GLM also provides other interesting data. A new word appears in the English language every 98 minutes. If you count it in days, you get about 15 words a day.
Another interesting fact: for a word to receive the status of “new”, it must be seen in literature, the media, and the Internet at least 25,000 times. Only after this is it included in the English dictionary.
How many words do you need to know to communicate?
If you are interested in the question of how many words you need to learn in order to communicate, then linguists say that for this you need to know 1 500 the most common words, for free communication you need to know at least 5 000 words, and to read books or news, no less 10 000 words
English speakers are apparently not used to being satisfied with the current potential of the language that they already have. And therefore, they boldly expand their vocabulary with new bright words, be it “grok” (deeply and intuitively understand), “crowdfunding” (collective financing), “hackathon” (brainstorming) or “twerk” (dance). However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
According to the linguistic portal Global Language Monitor, about 5,400 new words appear annually; and only 1000 (or so) subsequently become widely used, enough to be included in the printed version of the dictionary.
However, as usual, a number of questions arise: who invents these words? How? What rules govern their appearance? What factors determine whether a word will take root in a language or not? We will try to answer these questions in this article.
Number of words in English
First, let's answer the question: How many words are there really in the English language? There is no single reasonable answer to this question. It is impossible to count the number of words in a language because it is extremely difficult to decide what actually counts as a word. Whether, for example, “dog” is one word or two (the noun means “kind of animal” and the verb means “to hunt”).
It's also difficult to decide what exactly is considered a 100% "English" word. Medical and scientific terms? Latin words? French in cooking? German in academic writing? Japanese in martial arts? Whether to count the Scottish dialect, teenage slang and all the abbreviations is still a mystery.
Roughly speaking, it has been estimated that the English language consists of approximately one million words; this figure includes many names of chemical substances and other names of scientific organizations, etc. and so on.
However, it is worth understanding that not all of these words can be found in the dictionary. Moreover, slang words and neologisms, which are widely used by us on social networks, must go through a journey of several years, or even more, in order to be completely assimilated and become part of the English language. And only after this, this or that word will appear in the dictionary.
But there are official dictionaries of the English language! So, to find out how many words are in the English dictionary, it’s enough to look at their official data?
Well, as for printed or online dictionaries, Webster's Third New International Dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary contain approximately the same number of words (about 470,000).
The appearance of words in English
One of the most famous and beloved verbal swordsmen is certainly Shakespeare. It is in his works that at least 500 new words appear (including: “critic” (critic), “swagger” (bragging), “hint” (hint). However, we still don’t know for sure whether he invented them himself or was helped. Do you know?
It is generally accepted that the most generous with verbal allegories was John Milton(English poet and politician), who created about 630 words, including "fragrance" (fragrance) and "pandemonium" (pitch hell). It comes as no surprise that writers and poets are behind many of our lexical innovations. But the fact is that we have no idea who exactly is the creator of much of our vocabulary.
Our knowledge about who created this or that word is limited, and accordingly the very mechanism of their appearance and formation is quite transparent and uncomplicated.
However, it is known that there are several ways to create words:
- Derivation(word production).
The most common way to create a new word is to add a prefix (prefix) or suffix to an existing word.
Thus, for example, the following lexical units appeared: “democratize” in 1798, “detonator” in 1822, “hyperlink” in 1987, etc.
- Compounding(word formation).
Matching two existing words. Typically, compound words begin their lives as separate entities, then begin to be hyphenated, and eventually become a single entity.
An example would be the following nouns:
“fiddlestick” (bow), “claptrap” (cheap chatter), “bailout” (exit from the crisis);
Words related to other parts of speech can also be used:
“into” (in) preposition; “nobody” (nobody) - pronoun; “daydream” (to indulge in daydreaming) - verb; “environmentally friendly” (does not have a negative impact on the environment) - adjective.
- Repurposing(repurposing).
We take a word from one context and place it in another. Thus, "crane", meaning crane, takes its name from the crane, which is known to have a rather long neck (crane); and the computer mouse, accordingly, was named after a rodent with a long tail (mouse).
- Conversion(change of part of speech).
The method is quite simple: the word remains unchanged in spelling, but its part of speech changes. For example, " giant"(giant) was simply a noun for a long time, until the early 15th century, when people began to use it as an adjective as well.
- Eponyms(eponyms).
Words named after a specific person or place. You've probably heard of "cheddar" (cheddar cheese) or "sandwich" (sandwich). But have you ever thought that “gun” (gun) and “marmalade” (jam) are also ethnonyms? However, the question of how long the capital letter remains in such words remains open to this day.
- Abbreviations(abbreviations).
The form of the word subsequently becomes shorter for ease of use, for example: “ pram"(baby stroller) will be completely "perambulator", "taxi/cab" (taxi) - "taximeter cabriolet", "goodbye" (goodbye) - "God be with you", "rifle" (rifle) - "rifled pistol " etc.
- Loanwords(borrowing).
Foreigners often complain that their language is full of borrowings from English. But the fact is that English itself is an insatiable word thief. Linguist David Crystal believes that English contains words that come from at least 350 languages.
Most words are taken from French, Latin and Greek; some have more exotic origins: Flemish ("hunk" - "muscular man"), Portuguese ("fetish" - "fetish"), Tahitian ("tattoo" - "tattoo"), Russian ("mammoth" - "mammoth") , Mayan (“shark” - “shark”), Japanese (“tycoon” - “boss”), Walloon (“rabbit” - “rabbit”) and Polynesian (“taboo” - “taboo”).
- Reduplication(repetition).
Repetition or near repetition of a word or sound. This method includes: “flip-flop” (change your point of view), “goody-goody” (good boy), “boo-boo” (stupid mistake, “blunder”), “helter-skelter” (confusion), “hanky-panky” (pranks), “hurly-burly” (confusion), “lovey-dovey” (loving doves), “higgledy-piggledy” (confusion), “tom-tom” (tom-tom).
Conclusion
As you have probably noticed, the topic of the emergence of new words is quite fascinating, although transparent. Every day the stock of English words is transformed and updated, and there is no limit to this. We hope that you enjoyed this article and that you have become even more accomplished. Learn English with pleasure and boldly step towards new knowledge!
Big and friendly EnglishDom family
Knowledge of English is required in many professions today. If it is not directly required by the employer, then, in most cases, you need it for personal purposes.
I constantly face the problem that I seem to already know a lot of words, but nevertheless, I have to constantly look into the dictionary. How many words are there in total? :)
How many words are there in English
In fact, the exact amount is very difficult to calculate. After all, each new word is born approximately every hour and a half. And besides, it is not entirely clear whether it is worth counting all the word forms of each word, which makes the task very difficult. Philologists wonder whether slang words are worth taking into account.
And, of course, it is very difficult to keep track of the emergence of new words. However, I found information about a company called GLM that does just that. According to her data, there are 1,004,010 words in the English language. A lot, right?
For comparison, it is believed that the Russian language has 500,000 words. This is 2 times less than in English. And I think the rate at which new words are introduced in the "high and mighty" is much slower than in English.
In addition, I wondered what a word needs to be officially introduced as new. After all, someone can simply utter a non-existent word in an interview. So what, it will appear in online dictionaries? No. It is not that simple. For a word to become officially registered, it must be mentioned on social networks about 25 thousand times.
Which languages have the most words?
The same English language comes first. But who is coming next? One American newspaper publication compiled a small list. Here is a list of the first four places after English:
- Chinese language - about five hundred thousand words. This number includes all kinds of dialects.
- Japanese language - two hundred thirty thousand words.
- Spanish - two hundred twenty-five thousand words.
- And only in fourth place is the Russian language - one hundred and ninety-five thousand words. At the top I wrote that there are about 500 thousand words in the Russian language. Yes, one source states exactly that. But USA Today thinks differently.
English is the most popular foreign language in the world. It seems that many people studying English have thought about the question, how many words are there in the English language? It is absolutely impossible to answer this question with absolute certainty. The fact is that language is a constantly evolving system: new concepts arise and names are invented, words are borrowed from other languages, etc.
How to count the number of words?
However, a group of enthusiasts in the United States set out to count the number of words in the English language and, for this purpose, united in the Global Language Monitor organization. As a criterion, they decided to use the frequency of mention of words in periodicals, Internet publications, comments on forums and social networks. To be included in the list of English words, you must find at least 25 thousand mentions of a given word.
In 2009, the Global Language Monitor announced that it knew how many words there are currently in the English language - 1 million. However, taking into account that the name “Web 2.0” was recorded as the millionth word, one can doubt the correctness of the calculation. Can this be considered a word? By comparison, the authoritative Merriam-Webster dictionary contains fewer than 500 thousand words. However, enthusiasts from the Global Language Monitor are convinced that every 98 minutes a new word is added to the English language. It is not difficult to calculate that, in this case, at the end of 2012, the English language should contain 1 million 18 thousand words.
By the way, the average native speaker knows less than 75 thousand words, and actively uses only 10-20 thousand. To communicate normally in English, it is enough to know 3000 words.
How many words are there in Russian?
What's in the Russian language? Also, as in the case of English, it is difficult to talk about any absolutely accurate numbers. But, apparently, there are significantly fewer words in the Russian language. The Dictionary of Modern Russian Literary Language (aka BAS), published in the late 60s, had only 131,257 words. However, this dictionary did not include abbreviations, which are now also considered words. In addition, many scientific and professional terms, as well as dialect words, were missing from the BAS. According to some estimates, the Russian language currently contains about half a million words. Of these, 2000-3000 words are the most common.