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How many words are there in the English language?
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Good morning, good afternoon, or of course even good evening, depending on where in the
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world you happen to be right now. I'm Julian, and this is doing English.
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Yesterday we answered the question "Which language has the most words" and we said it
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was English, but how many words are in the English language? This, unfortunately, is
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an incredibly difficult question to answer. It depends on how we count a word. For example,
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"eat" and "ate". Is it one word or two words? Are they the same; "eat" and "ate"? In one
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sense, "ate" is simply the past form of "eat," but the word is spelled different. It's pronounced
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different. It has a different meaning, therefore, surely it should be a different word.
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How about "eat" and "eats," or "eat" and "eaten," or how about "eating." Are these all the same
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word, or are they different words? Again, they're similar but they do have different
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meanings and they are pronounced differently, but at the same time, they have the same root
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word, "eat." Do we count them as one, in which case it's one word, or do we count them as
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five, in which case it's five words? Clearly, how we decide to count words like this is
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going to make a massive difference to the number of words that we count in the English
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language. For this reason, basically nobody is agreed on this.
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There's a fantastic discussion on this in the book "Vocabulary in Language Teaching"
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by Norbert Schmitt. He writes that estimates vary from somewhere between about 400,000
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and 2 million, again depending on how you count the words and depending on who is doing
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the counting; 400,000 to 2 million. That is a massive difference. We generally accept
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that there's about 250,000 in common use, again depending on how you count them, and
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again depending on who is doing the counting. The problem again is we don't really know
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how to count these words, but generally an accepted figure is about 250,000 words in
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common use, and about 1 million words in the language.
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I will say, however, that it's also estimated that a native speaker who has graduated university,
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at about the point of graduating university only actually knows about 10% of the words
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in common use. If there is about 25,000 words in common use, then the average native speaker
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at the point of graduating university will know about 25,000 words, a very tiny percentage.
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To answer the question, probably about 1 million, but about 250,000 in common use, but about
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25,000 that people actually know and use, and the words that are actually used on a
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daily basis is much, much smaller than that as well. About a million is a good estimate,
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I think.
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