![]() To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989, contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. ![]() What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Teenage slang? Abbreviations? It's also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog? dogs = plural noun, dogs = present tense of the verb). Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (e.g. ![]() It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually counts as a word. ![]() There is no single sensible answer to this question. How many words are there in the English language?
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