According to the Global Language Monitor, the English language is rushing headlong towards it's millionth word in about 38 days. One million words! Goodness. That's more than any other language. But hang on a minute. What is a word? For example, AskOxford asks, should dog be counted as one word or two words? That's because it is a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently'. And should hot dog be counted as a new word or counted as a construction of hot and dog and therefore not a new word. And what about borrowed words from Latin, Japanese, French and so on that we use but aren't really English words at present? Do we count those?
Some more commentary from AskOxford:
The Second Edition of the Oxford 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 interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (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.
According to the Economist, the Merriam-Webster lists about 450,000 words in its lexicon. That count is very different from the OED. Ah! What's a word lover to think? It appears that counting up the number of words in a language is futile. But it's exciting to see English, grow, transform and change over time. This means we never stop learning about the English language. It also means we need to discard old usage as the language evolves. English is truly is a living language. Every day, some new aspect of it amazes me.
