How many words are there in the English language?

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. read more

No one knows. But that hasn't stopped an operation known as the Global Language Monitor from estimating * that—as of this writing—there are exactly 988,968 words in English. read more

Many of these words are part of English core vocabulary, such as egg or knife. English has also borrowed many words directly from Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages, during all stages of its development. Many of these words were earlier borrowed into Latin from Greek. read more

The Second Edition of the 20-volume 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. read more

There is no exact count of the number of words in English, and one reason is certainly because languages are ever expanding; in addition, their boundaries are always flexible. Consider such words as "cannoli" and "teriyaki," which come from other tongues but are established through use, context, and frequency as English. read more

In fact, if you were to count every number between 0 and 999,999 as a word, you'd have a cool million right there—and still have the rest of the English language to account for. read more