Knowledge of English is required in many professions today. If it is not directly required by the employer, then, in most cases, you need it for personal purposes.
I constantly face the problem that I seem to already know a lot of words, but nevertheless, I have to constantly look into the dictionary. How many words are there in total? :)
How many words are there in English
In fact, the exact amount is very difficult to calculate. After all, each new word is born approximately every hour and a half. And besides, it is not entirely clear whether it is worth counting all the word forms of each word, which makes the task very difficult. Philologists wonder whether slang words are worth taking into account.
And, of course, it is very difficult to keep track of the emergence of new words. However, I found information about a company called GLM that does just that. According to her data, in English language there are 1004010 words. A lot, right?
For comparison, it is believed that the Russian language has 500,000 words. This is 2 times less than in English. And I think the rate at which new words are introduced in the "high and mighty" is much slower than in English.
In addition, I wondered what a word needs to be officially introduced as new. After all, someone can simply utter a non-existent word in an interview. So what, it will appear in online dictionaries? No. It is not that simple. For a word to become officially registered, it must be mentioned in in social networks about 25 thousand times.
Which languages have the most words?
The same English language comes first. But who is coming next? One American newspaper publication compiled a small list. Here is a list of the first four places after English:
- Chinese- about five hundred thousand words. This number includes all kinds of dialects.
- Japanese- two hundred thirty thousand words.
- Spanish - two hundred twenty-five thousand words.
- And only in fourth place is the Russian language - one hundred and ninety-five thousand words. At the top I wrote that there are about 500 thousand words in the Russian language. Yes, one source states exactly that. But USA Today thinks differently.
English speakers are apparently not used to being satisfied with the current potential of the language that they already have. And therefore, they boldly expand their vocabulary with new bright words, be it “grok” (deeply and intuitively understand), “crowdfunding” (collective financing), “hackathon” (brainstorming) or “twerk” (dance). However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
According to the linguistic portal Global Language Monitor, about 5,400 new words appear annually; and only 1000 (or so) subsequently become widely used, enough to be included in the printed version of the dictionary.
However, as usual, a number of questions arise: who invents these words? How? What rules govern their appearance? What factors determine whether a word will take root in a language or not? We will try to answer these questions in this article.
Number of words in English
First, let's answer the question: How many words are there really in the English language? There is no single reasonable answer to this question. It is impossible to count the number of words in a language because it is extremely difficult to decide what actually counts as a word. Whether, for example, “dog” is one word or two (the noun means “kind of animal” and the verb means “to hunt”).
It's also difficult to decide what exactly is considered a 100% "English" word. Medical and scientific terms? Latin words? French in cooking? German in academic writing? Japanese in martial arts? Whether to count the Scottish dialect, teenage slang and all the abbreviations is still a mystery.
Roughly speaking, it has been estimated that the English language consists of approximately one million words; this figure includes many items chemical substances and other names scientific organizations etc. and so on.
However, it is worth understanding that not all of these words can be found in the dictionary. Moreover, slang words and neologisms, which are widely used by us on social networks, must go through a journey of several years, or even more, in order to be completely assimilated and become part of the English language. And only after this, this or that word will appear in the dictionary.
But there are official dictionaries of the English language! So to find out how many words there are in English dictionary, is it enough to look at their official data?
Well, as for printed or online dictionaries, then Webster's Third New International Dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary present approximately the same number of words (about 470,000).
The appearance of words in English
One of the most famous and beloved verbal swordsmen is certainly Shakespeare. It is in his works that at least 500 new words appear (including: “critic” (critic), “swagger” (bragging), “hint” (hint). However, we still don’t know for sure whether he invented them himself or was helped. Do you know?
It is generally accepted that the most generous with verbal allegories was John Milton(English poet and political figure), who created about 630 words, including "fragrance" (fragrance) and "pandemonium" (pitch hell). It comes as no surprise that writers and poets are behind many of our lexical innovations. But the fact is that we have no idea who exactly is the creator of much of our vocabulary.
Our knowledge about who created this or that word is limited, and accordingly the very mechanism of their appearance and formation is quite transparent and uncomplicated.
However, it is known that there are several ways to create words:
- Derivation(word production).
The most common way to create a new word is to add a prefix (prefix) or suffix to an existing word.
Thus, for example, the following lexical units appeared: “democratize” in 1798, “detonator” in 1822, “hyperlink” in 1987, etc.
- Compounding(word formation).
Matching two existing words. Usually, compound words begin their lives as separate entities, then begin to be hyphenated, and eventually become one.
An example would be the following nouns:
“fiddlestick” (bow), “claptrap” (cheap chatter), “bailout” (exit from the crisis);
Words related to other parts of speech can also be used:
“into” (in) preposition; “nobody” (nobody) - pronoun; “daydream” (to indulge in daydreaming) - verb; “environmentally friendly” (does not have a negative impact on environment) - adjective .
- Repurposing(repurposing).
We take a word from one context and place it in another. Thus, "crane" meaning crane, got its name from the crane, which, as you know, has a rather long neck (crane); and the computer mouse, accordingly, was named after a rodent with a long tail (mouse).
- Conversion(change of part of speech).
The method is quite simple: the word remains unchanged in spelling, but its part of speech changes. For example, " giant"(giant) for a long time was simply a noun until the early 15th century, when people began to use it as an adjective.
- Eponyms(eponyms).
Words named after a specific person or place. You've probably heard of "cheddar" (cheddar cheese) or "sandwich" (sandwich). But have you ever thought that “gun” (gun) and “marmalade” (jam) are also ethnonyms? However, the question of how long such words remain capital letter the letter remains open to this day.
- Abbreviations(abbreviations).
The form of the word subsequently becomes shorter for ease of use, for example: “ pram"(baby stroller) will be completely "perambulator", "taxi/cab" (taxi) - "taximeter cabriolet", "goodbye" (goodbye) - "God be with you", "rifle" (rifle) - "rifled pistol " etc.
- Loanwords(borrowing).
Foreigners often complain that their language is full of borrowings from English. But the fact is that English itself is an insatiable word thief. Linguist David Crystal believes that English contains words that come from at least 350 languages.
Most words are taken from French, Latin and Greek languages; some have more exotic origins: Flemish ("hunk" - "muscular man"), Portuguese ("fetish" - "fetish"), Tahitian ("tattoo" - "tattoo"), Russian ("mammoth" - "mammoth") , Mayan (“shark” - “shark”), Japanese (“tycoon” - “boss”), Walloon (“rabbit” - “rabbit”) and Polynesian (“taboo” - “taboo”).
- Reduplication(repetition).
Repetition or near repetition of a word or sound. This method includes: “flip-flop” (change your point of view), “goody-goody” (good boy), “boo-boo” (stupid mistake, “blunder”), “helter-skelter” (confusion), “hanky-panky” (pranks), “hurly-burly” (confusion), “lovey-dovey” (loving doves), “higgledy-piggledy” (confusion), “tom-tom” (tom-tom).
Conclusion
As you have probably noticed, the topic of the emergence of new words is quite fascinating, although transparent. Every day stock English words transforms and updates and there is no limit to this. We hope that you enjoyed this article and that you have become even more accomplished. Learn English with pleasure and boldly step towards new knowledge!
Big and friendly EnglishDom family
Every year the number of words in the English language is growing: 14.7 lexical units appear per day. Much has changed in the English language since the days of Shakespeare, who used an average of 20,000 words in his works. Some words are practically not used today, but few people still know about those that have appeared again.
It is quite difficult to accurately answer the question about the number of words in the English language, since this number is constantly growing. Even a dozen years ago the number in 500 000 words for English language learners seemed like an ominous number, but now students react more easily to growing numbers, realizing that they won’t be able to cover all the words, and why would they?
The main fixator of vocabulary in English is “ Global Language Monitor"(GLM), the same organization records every new word that appears in magazines and newspapers, scientific and fiction, as well as on the Internet, namely on social networks, blogs, podcasts.
And if you still can’t wait to find out the word count, then according to “ GLM» on January 1, 2016 there were 1 035 877 .
What a surprise it was that the top word of 2015 was “ microaggression”, and the most popular expression is “ migrant crisis" I think everyone understands why these words became popular. “ Microaggression” is a scientific term that has taken over all European and American tabloids, but “ migrant crisis” is an expression describing the movement of more than a million refugees from the Middle East (mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan), as well as from North Africa to Europe. This migration is the largest since World War II.
2014 was characterized by completely different words and expressions, and the vector of words did not even come close to political events in the world. Word " emoji” has captured the hearts of millions of people on the planet, so today even toddlers know what it is (if you are no longer a toddler, but still don’t know what we’re talking about, then we’ll suggest - an ideogram, an emoticon or a smile).
The English language continues to confidently stride across the planet, allowing words to penetrate deeper and deeper into every sphere of activity and into the world consciousness. So, the expression “ climate changing”, used with the ending “ing”, indicates continued climate change. Far from a new word “ refugee” – refugee, is again heard more and more often, describing migrants who were forced to leave their homes because of the war.
“Content” is a buzzword denoting information, material. Popular words of 2015 also included “ affluenza” – combination “ affluence” + “influenza” = affluence + flu, actually referring to healthy, wealthy people who are plagued by lack of motivation, guilt and a sense of isolation. ” Opioids“Opioid painkillers and heroin kill far more people in the United States than cars and gun violence.
Among the common expressions of 2015 there is also “ digital darkness” (digital darkness) – what can happen if we stop accessing digital information, so keep paper copies of your favorite photos just in case.
How do words become popular?
In order to be included in the GLM list, a word must meet certain requirements:
Depth determined by the appearance in various forms in the media, latitude– spreading the word throughout the world, not limited to a certain field of activity.
Today, popular words include not only the achievements of science and technology, not only the hybrids “spanglish”, “danglish” and others, but also youth slang, as well as web slang.
Note that in everyday life of a native speaker there are approximately 50,000 – 70,000 words, many of which are practically not used. For a person just about to master foreign language, at the initial stage it will be enough to learn 3 000 – 5 000 words Ideally, to read literature, understand what is happening and fully communicate, you need to remember 15 000 – 17 000 lexical units.
This is interesting:
To type all the words in the English language, a person would need 744 days, assuming an eight-hour workday and a ten-minute break per hour. However, the vocabulary will be replenished and you will have to spend much more time, namely 2 years 135 days and 4 hours.
The vocabulary of the English language is rapidly filling with new lexical units. Scientists have calculated that an average of 15 new words appear per day, but not all of them take root in the language, but only those that are most widespread.
If not "selfie" in 2013, we would never have known that a self-shot had a specific title. Following him came the well-known today “bookfie”,"shelfie", "legsie" and others, which can often be found on social networks in the form of hashtags. If you are a person who does not complain about fantasy, you can come up with your own word ending in “sie”/“fie”, post it on a social network and see what the effect is.
Printed dictionaries and word counts
About 15 years ago you could buy an English dictionary containing 500 000 words At that time, such a number seemed quite decent even for a linguist, because, according to scientists, the average person uses about 5,000 words in his speech. This is what is called an active dictionary. All other lexical units remain passive: we can recognize and understand them in texts, but not use them in everyday speech.
How many words do you need to know?
Now let's move on to the question of how many words you need to know in English. It all depends on how to talk, who to talk to and what topics to discuss. In order to communicate with a pen pal, 500-1000 words, including verbs, nouns and adjectives, will be enough. For comparison, the active vocabulary of a native speaker is from 15,000 to 40,000 words. However, it’s worth making a little reservation here so that every student of English doesn’t think that you can master a thousand words and chat freely. This thousand is different for everyone. And if you look into the frequency dictionary, it becomes clear that most vocabulary make up prepositions, pronouns, numerals, question words that may not be used at all in conversation.
According to the authors of the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, in order to understand 80-90% of the text, you need 3,000 words, which approximately corresponds to the Intermediate level.
In order for words not to become passive, they must be used regularly - repeated at certain intervals. Even better is to work with flash cards, which allow you to repeat everything that has been covered at any time.
In order not to guess the meaning of phrases, but to know them for sure, you will need a little more units - approximately 5,000 - 6,000. With such a reserve, you can freely read books, watch films, and communicate on the most common topics.
GLM and new words in English
If we look at the GLM (Global Language Monitor), we can see how many words in the English language appear regularly and become popular. And this is neither more nor less than 1,041,258 (at the time of writing). And this number is constantly growing. Despite such a vocabulary boom, this does not mean that everyone will be able to actively use new words, so you should focus on the most frequently used units.
You may ask, how do words become popular, who popularizes them? Of course, the media and social networks. In order for a word to be included in the GLM list, it must be repeated at least 25,000 times, covering a certain breadth and depth of use. Depth is the form of words in the media, and breadth is its distribution throughout the world.
What words are popular today?
Bigly - extremely, very, strongly. It became popular after Donald Trump used a different meaning in his speech “I”m going to cut taxes bigly, and you”re going to raise taxes bigly. Social networks literally exploded from what they heard, discussing whether he really used this word in the right context. Later it turned out that Trump used the expression “big league”, but this no longer had any meaning.
Below you can see the most popular words today:
- Brexit - exit of Great Britain from the European Union;
- non-binary - polysexuality, attraction to several genders;
- memory care - fight against Alzheimer's disease;
- texticate - write messages on social networks;
- trumpism - the style of thinking and behavior of a Republican;
- futebol is a variation on the theme of football. The world first saw this word in Brazil in 2011;
- emoticons. smileys, emoji’s - emoticons (smiles) used by everyone in correspondence. Since 2013, these words have become especially popular;
- Chinglish - Chinese-English. However, such words today are enough to understand that that same variable English is spreading around the world at lightning speed.
In December 2016, the expression Web 2.0 emerged, a technical term for a new generation of web products and services. Interestingly, the word 1,00,001 became “financial tsunami” - a global financial restructuring that came out of nowhere and cost trillions of dollars.
This term was preceded by the following words:
- jai ho - long live victory (translation from Hindi);
- N00b is a derogatory term for a newbie who makes unforgivable mistakes;
- slumdog - a person living in the slums;
- cloud computing - cloud computing;
- carbon neutral - with a neutral carbon release rate;
- slow food - a movement against the fast food system;
- octomom - mother of eight children Nadya Suleman;
- greenwashing - green camouflage, a form of eco-marketing that uses methods that indicate the environmental friendliness of products;
- defriend - remove from the list of friends, “unfriend”.
So how many basic words are there?
It is quite difficult to answer the question of how many basic words there are in the English language, since these very basic words can vary from person to person. You can select an average of 150-200 verbs and 500 nouns, connect them all with prepositions and pronouns and see what happens.
People who start learning English are often interested in the question of how many English words to learn per day. You shouldn’t overload yourself with 50 or 100 words a day, as you won’t last long; 10-15 words will be enough to simultaneously replenish your vocabulary and not lose your desire to learn English.
If you want to know the most up-to-date information, check it out. Thanks to the tutorial, you will master English without leaving home, and the articles will help answer all your questions.
The fact that the language's dictionary contains approximately 300 thousand words is only of theoretical interest for a beginner learning this language. Almost main principle for the reasonable organization of your studies, especially at the initial stage, this is an economy of words. You need to learn to memorize as few words as possible, but do it as best as possible.
Let us emphasize that our approach is directly opposite to the guiding principle of “suggestopedia”, with its emphasis on the abundance of words presented to the student. As you know, in accordance with its canons, a beginner needs to be literally “showered with words.” It is best to give him or her 200 new words every day.
Is there any doubt that any normal person will forget all those numerous words with which he was “showered” using this, so to speak, method - and most likely very soon, in just a few days.
Don't chase too much
It will be much better if at the end of a certain stage of study you know 500 or 1000 words very well than 3000 - but poorly. Don’t let yourself be led into a dead end by teachers who will assure you that you need to first learn a certain number of words in order to “get into the swing of things.” Only you yourself can and must decide whether the vocabulary you have mastered is sufficient for your goals and interests.
Language learning experience shows that about 400 well-chosen words can cover up to 90 percent of the vocabulary you need for everyday communication purposes. In order to read, you will need more words, but many of them are only passive. Therefore, with knowledge of 1500 words, you can already understand fairly meaningful texts.
It is better to master the words that are most necessary and important to you than to constantly rush to learn new ones. “He who pursues too much risks missing everything,” says a Swedish proverb. “If you chase two hares, you won’t catch either,” a Russian proverb answers.
Vocabulary in oral speech
Very roughly speaking, about 40 well-chosen, high-frequency words will cover about 50% of word usage in everyday speech in any language;
- 200 words will cover about 80%;
- 300 words - approximately 85%;
- 400 words will cover about 90%;
- Well, 800-1000 words are about 95% of what would need to be said or heard in the most ordinary situation.
Thus, the right vocabulary helps you understand quite a lot with very little effort spent on cramming.
Example: if a total of 1000 words are spoken in an everyday conversation, then 500 of them, that is, 50%, will be covered by the 40 most common high-frequency words.
We emphasize that these percentages, of course, are not the result of exact calculations. They just give the most general concept about how many words it will take to feel confident when entering into simple dialogue with a native speaker. In any case, there is no doubt that by correctly choosing from 400 to 800 words and remembering them well, you can feel confident in a simple conversation, since they will cover almost 100% of those words that you cannot do without. Of course, under other, less favorable conditions, 400 words will cover only 80% of what you need to know - instead of 90 or 100%.
Reading vocabulary
When reading, having correctly chosen and well remembered about 80 of the most common, most frequent words, you will understand about 50% of a simple text;
- 200 words will cover approximately 60%;
- 300 words - 65%;
- 400 words - 70%;
- 800 words - approximately 80%;
- 1500 - 2000 words - about 90%;
- 3000 - 4000 - 95%;
- and 8,000 words will cover almost 99 percent of the written text.
Example: if you have a text in front of you with a volume of approximately 10 thousand words (this is approximately 40 printed pages), then, having learned the most necessary 400 words in advance, you will understand about 7000 words that are used in this text.
Let us note again that the figures we give are only indicative. Depending on various additional conditions, 50 words will cover up to 50 percent of the written text, but in other cases you will need to learn at least 150 words to get the same result.
Vocabulary: from 400 to 100,000 words
- 400 - 500 words - active vocabulary for language proficiency at a basic (threshold) level.
- 800 - 1000 words - active vocabulary in order to explain yourself; or passive reading vocabulary at a basic level.
- 1500 - 2000 words - active vocabulary, which is quite enough to ensure everyday communication throughout the day; or passive vocabulary sufficient for confident reading.
- 3000 - 4000 words - in general, enough for almost fluent reading of newspapers or literature in the specialty.
- About 8,000 words - provide complete communication for the average European. There is practically no need to know more words in order to communicate freely both orally and in writing, as well as read literature of any kind.
- 10,000-20,000 words - the active vocabulary of an educated European (in their native language).
- 50,000-100,000 words - the passive vocabulary of an educated European (in their native language).
It should be noted that vocabulary alone does not ensure free communication. At the same time, having mastered 1,500 correctly chosen words, with some additional training, you will be able to communicate almost freely.
As for professional terms, they usually do not present any particular difficulties, since in most cases this is an international vocabulary that is quite easy to master.
When you already know about 1500 words, you can start reading at a fairly decent level. With passive knowledge of 3,000 to 4,000 words, you will be fluent in reading literature in your specialty, at least in those areas where you are confident. In conclusion, we note that, according to calculations carried out by linguists based on a number of languages, the average educated European actively uses about 20,000 words (and half of them are quite rare). In this case, the passive vocabulary is at least 50,000 words. But all this concerns the native language.
Basic vocabulary
In the pedagogical literature you can find the terminological combination “basic vocabulary”. From my point of view, at the maximum level the vocabulary is about 8000 words. It seems to me that it is hardly necessary to learn more words, except perhaps for some special purposes. Eight thousand words will be enough for full communication in any conditions.
When starting to learn a language, it would be wise to spend more short lists. Here are three levels that I have found in practice to provide a good guide for a beginner:
- level A("basic vocabulary"):
400-500 words. They are enough to cover approximately 90% of all word usage in everyday oral communication or about 70% of simple written text;
- level B(“minimum vocabulary”, “mini-level”):
800-1000 words. They are enough to cover approximately 95% of all word usage in everyday oral communication or about 80-85% of written text;
- level B("average vocabulary", "medium level"):
1500-2000 words. They are enough to cover approximately 95-100% of all word usage in everyday oral communication or about 90% of written text.
An example of a good dictionary of basic vocabulary can be considered the dictionary published by E. Klett in Stuttgart, 1971, under the title "Grundwortschatz Deutsch" ("Basic vocabulary of the German language"). It contains 2,000 of the most essential words in each of a selected six languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian.
Eric W. Gunnemark, Swedish polyglot