There is no single sensible answer to this 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. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning
'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count
it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (e.g. dogs = plural
noun, dogs = present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other
words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since it might also be
written as hot-dog or even hotdog?
It's also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What
about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used
in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in
martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Teenage slang? Abbreviations?
English Dictionary contains full 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
exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures
don't take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as
noun and adjective).
This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter
of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from
technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet
added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer
in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably
approach three quarters of a million.
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