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According to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks language usage trends, the English language currently tops a whopping 1 million distinct words. Included in such English language lists are tons and tons of scientific words that many of us don’t know but, of course, still qualify as words.
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.
It’s safe to say that the average vocabulary of people is less than the total number of words in English. When you use the to count the number of words you’ve typed in an essay, that number will only be a fraction of the total number of words in English.
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 ...
The short answer is: about a million,” he told RD.com. Doubt you know anything even close to a million words? Don’t sweat it. “That number includes any number of legal, medical, scientific, and...
About 8,500 words enter the English language each year; in total, there are just over 1 million words in the English Language; The number of English words has grown about 70% since 1950; About 1/2 of the new words are not in any dictionary and were dubbed in the study “Lexical Dark Matter.”
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.
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.
According to this list, as of 1989, there are around 171,000 words circulating in the English language. Clearly, then, there is a big range in how many words you count in the English language, depending on how you define a unique word and how else you set your parameters.
“The average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 20,000 words, while his passive vocabulary is around 40,000 words.” The Value of Word Lists. While it’s not 100 percent clear how many words are in the English language, we know how important it is to compile the most complete lists of terms we can.