# Numbers of words in different languages



## Sev

I'd like to know if someone has an idea of the number of words used in English, Italian, Spanish, German, French....because my friends and I do not always agree...especially between english and french.

Some people say that english has much more words (e.g. "grand" in french is big, tall, broad, wide, large and so on), others think it's the contrary and then I think it's more or less equivalent.

What's your opinion, have you got informations ?

Sev


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## Silvia

Well, about the languages you mentioned, I think German has the longest words, English has the shortest words, Italian is the most articulate/complex along with French, Spanish is the most excessive/redundant. About the quantity of words in each languages, I guess it's impossible to be determined, languages evolve unceasingly. You might compare dictionary editions though...


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## belén

I heard that Harry Potter's latest book, in the English original had eight hundred and something pages, while in German it had one thousand and something. It would be interesting to know in Spanish, Portuguese and so on..


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## walnut

In italian it's 804 pages (just to know it: a very, very good translation). But number of pages also depends on book's/font dimensions. Ciao!  Walnut


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## dave

silviap said:
			
		

> ... Italian is the most articulate/complex ...


No personal bias there then Silvia?  




			
				silviap said:
			
		

> ... Spanish is the most excessive/redundant.


Let battle commence!


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## dave

According to Bill Bryson's book 'Mother Tongue', English has about 200,000 words in common use, German 184,000 and French 100,000 (no mention of Spanish or Italian unfortunately, but I would suspect that they will have a similar number to French). He also notes that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has 615,000 entries (although many of these will be archaic) and says that if technical and scientific terms are included they would add millions more.

The simple reason that English has so many words is that it is very much a mongrel language, with influences from Celtic, Latin, Danish, German and French (among others). For almost all words with a Germanic origin (e.g. motherhood) there is a synonym of Latin or French origin (e.g. maternity). 

This is also one of the reasons why English is so darn difficult to master!


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## Silvia

Dave,

The Italian Dictionary by Battaglia is the most massive dictionary (22,504 pages on 3 columns with no pictures) followed by The Oxford English Dictionary (21,730 pages).

Are you happy now?


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## Focalist

It's the number of words in common use that matters - not the prolixity of dictionaries. 

F


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## dave

silviap said:
			
		

> Dave,
> 
> The Italian Dictionary by Battaglia is the most massive dictionary (22,504 pages on 3 columns with no pictures) followed by The Oxford English Dictionary (21,730 pages).
> 
> Are you happy now?


Over the moon!


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## Silvia

Over the moon?   Me or the dictionary?


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## dave

Me! _Over the moon_ = _very very happy _ (it's a cliche often used by footballers!)


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## Silvia

awww  

You see I was misled by my own language! We have the same expression and it means "to have one's head in the clouds"


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## Sev

Quite interesting you all, but now I'di like to add stg : how many percent of all these words (let's say 150 000) do we really use every day ??? 


How do you say "les paris sont lancés" in English ? !!


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## dave

Sev said:
			
		

> Quite interesting you all, but now I'di like to add stg : how many percent of all these words (let's say 150 000) do we really use every day ???



This is a tricky one. The following article may be of interest though:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm


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## temujin

Read somewhere that you need to know approx. 10 000 words of a language to be able to participate in a normal conversation. (...of course, it does matter which words you learn...)


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## Silvia

I'm not sure I know 10,000 words in English! Nevertheless, I'm answering  Thus I can engage myself in a conversation...


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## temujin

...hm. well, maybe instead of "normal conversation" it should be "daily life". That makes more sense. 10 000 sounds like an awful lot of words.


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## Benjy

it hink you'll find that only a couple of thousand is sufficient to live in a country express youself and be understood. i am sure that i do not know 10000 french words, but i lived there for two years and had very little diffficulty is understanding or being understood, and it was _very_ rare that someone would teach me a new word or say a word that i didnt know, and it was more often than not when a technical subject would come up in conversation.


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## cuchuflete

Hello to all,
If anyone has time, sorry I do not, at least today, they can Google ´passive vocabulary´and ´active vocabulary´.  The latter is the collection of words one uses on a daily basis, and the former is the group of words one can understand without recourse to dictionary.  A recent article posted in one of the forums referred to the decline in the size of the Spanish active vocabulary.  I don´t recall the numbers.
I believe the average American from USA has a active vocabulary of fewer than 1000 words, but can understand many more.

ciao,
Cuchu


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## Sharon

I read this thread a while ago, and found it interesting.I recently read something that reminded me of it, and I wanted to come back and leave a few comments.
At this website: http://www.wordorigins.org/number.htm  I found the following:





> The OED2, the largest English-language dictionary, contains some 290,000 entries with some 616,500 word forms. Of course, there are lots of slang and regional words that are not included and the big dictionary omits many proper names, scientific and technical terms, and jargon as a matter of editorial policy (e.g., there are some 1.4 million named species of insect alone). All told, estimates of the total vocabulary of English start at around three million words and go up from there.
> 
> Of these, about 200,000 words are in common use today. *An educated person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and uses about 2,000 in a week's conversation. *_(These estimates vary widely depending on who is doing the counting, so don't take them as absolute.)_


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				Silviap said:
			
		

> I'm not sure I know 10,000 words in English! Nevertheless, I'm answering  Thus I can engage myself in a conversation...


Silviap, I'm willing to bet you know 10,000 words in English - you just don't know that you know them.  As far as engaging in conversation, part of a conversation is also understanding what the other person has said. (You can't talk *all* the time!)   To argue my point, look at the word "mouse."   From "mouse" we also have the words "fieldmouse," "mousetrap," "moused," "mousing," "mouses," "mouser," "mouselike," "mousiness," "mousily," "mousier," "mousiest," and "mousy" (or "mousey.") You may not have known all these "mouse-words" existed, but you know enough English to understand them, if someone were to use them in conversation! 

Sharon.


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## vachecow

I may be wrong, but I think that Japanese has more words than any of the languages that you guys are discussing.


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## danielfranco

After posting in so many other threads with the same comment, I still cannot find my source...
Supposedly, the English language has about four times as many words as the next "wordy" language, making it the "wordiest" language. And that's even after taking a shrinking: by the 13th century the English language had about 100,000 words more than today.


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## tvdxer

I think it depends on your definition of "word", but if my memory serves me right, the full version of Oxford English Dictionary (the closest to "authoritative") contained something along the lines of 700 or 800,000 words.  Of course, most English speakers, even very educated ones with high verbal intelligences don't know near that many.  I'm sure a great portion of them are technical terms known primarily to those in the respective fields...for example, I doubt many computer programmers are aware of words like "allophone", "ductile", or "henotheism".


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## deGerlaise

English has by far the largest number of words in their language and it also has the greatest number of 'sounds'. Forget the exact number. English is  a language that is not particularly concerned about its purity, therefore you get a large number of words which are borrowed from other languages and incorporated them into standard English. Bungalow, pyjamas, pot pourri, rodeo, bronco and on and on and on. English, particularly North American English has borrowed a good chunk of words from Amerindian languages - teepee, wigwam, muskeg, chipmunk, canoe, cigar, hammock, kayak. Quite a number in fact.


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## maxiogee

I see a reference in an Irish newspaper today to the 'fact' that English is expected to soon hit its millionth word.


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## Residente Calle 13

deGerlaise said:
			
		

> English has by far the largest number of words in their language and it also has the greatest number of 'sounds'. Forget the exact number.



It has the greatest number of 'sounds' ?  What does that mean ?


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## danielfranco

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> It has the greatest number of 'sounds' ? What does that mean ?


 
Right-o! Because, if the reference is made about phonemes and allophones (hope that's spelled correctly...), then there are other languages that have more of those than English. To be sure, English has roughly twice as many as Spanish, but it has only about a third of some African languages.


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