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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.
There is one count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words — but that count presumably includes words such as Latin species names, prefixed and suffixed words, scientific terminology, jargon, foreign words of extremely limited English use and technical acronyms.
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.
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 ...
“How many words are there in the English language? 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.
Today, there are more than a million words in English. According to the research of Harvard University from 2010, there are around 1.200.000 words in English. People currently use around 170.000 words, and each person uses 20.000 to 30.000 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.
This study estimated that there are just over a million words in the English language. Most scholars, though, agree that this number is somewhat inflated – in part by the counting of similar words – and look to dictionaries for a more realistic guide.
“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.