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It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly 1 million words (although most linguists would take that estimate with a chunk of salt, and some have said they wouldn't be surprised if it is off the mark by a quarter-million); that tally includes the myriad names of chemicals and other scientific entities.
Over the years, English has been influenced by and adopted words from various languages, and today, it contains words from hundreds of different languages. These words are estimated to make up about 80% of the English language.
In this article, we’ll be looking at how many words are in the English language. We’ll also look at how many words the average person knows. Finally, we’ll compare the number of words in English to the number of words found in other languages.
How many words does the average English speaker know? So, if a million words is the absolute upper echelon, how does that compare with the approximate vocabulary of most English speakers?
It might be impossible to figure out how many English words there are, but we definitely know what the most used word is—it’s the, which accounts for around 4 percent of the words English ...
And, according to lexicographer Susie Dent, most people only use 20,000 words of those 40,000-plus words on a regular basis: “The average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 20,000 words, while his passive vocabulary is around 40,000 words.”.
As of March 2020, according to the “ About Us ” section of the website, OED provides “…the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.”. This number—600,000—includes obsolete words, common words, and jargon.
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.
Global Language Monitor’s official estimate of the number of words in the English language as of November 11, 2022 is: 1,074,372.4. Official Estimate of the Number of English Words Created Every Day. 14.7 words Per Day. English has continued to churn out about 14.7 neologisms per day — about 5366 words a year.
To take a famous case, the entry for set in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to 60,000 words. The noun alone has 47 separate senses listed. Are all these distinct words? And in a wider sense, what do you include in your list of words? Do you count all the regional variations of English? Or slang? Dialect? Family or private language?