Talk:Number of words in English

I hold the copyright to this material and have changed the notification on the webpage in question to reflct this fact. Therefore, WP does indeed have explicit permission to use the papge in any form or format: Paul Payack.
 * Thank you for the clarification; I've "de-copyvio'd" (?) the page accordingly. -- Hoary 06:21, 2005 Jun 9 (UTC)

The current content has no substance at all. It mentions a "proprietary algorithm" which by definition is undocumented, and therefore can't be reviewed. And then gives a ridiculously accurate number. Is this someone's attempt at humor? Or just some sort of linkspam to get higher pagerank for languagemonitor.com? This content has previously been deleted on English language with discussion on the Talk page which was never answered by the author. --Macrakis 06:51, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't miss the current version of this article one bit if it were deleted. The whole concept of "number of words in English" is too vague to be very meaningful.  To make it precise, the notion of "word" would have to be rigorously defined first.  But even then one can come to radically different conclusions about the total vocabulary size, depending on one's prior assumptions.  It's possible, though, to discuss these issues properly, which is the only excuse for not nominating this article for deletion. --MarkSweep 23:33, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The fact that the question is difficult to answer makes the page even more interesting. Most would not grasp how difficult and meaningless the counting can be before he even tried. Before trying or giving up answering the question, one has to wonder whether he wants to include scientific vocabulary, slang, and other variations of the language. Do we count both British and American English words ? In that case, what about typically Australian words ? Canadian ? Cajun ? And what about variations of a single word ? Do create and recreate count as two different words ? And then of course there is the question of what the count is worth. By that I mean, what can we compare it to ? French language officially counts 60,000 entries. However, the specific Duval's Dictionary for Coloring Materials (in french language) counts alone more than 100,000 entries. Other languages such as German can combine words to create new ones at will. How do you take that into account ? Finally, the politically correct attitude created new words as well. Is "little person" a word of its own or a combination of existing words ? If it is a combination, what do we do with hotdog ? We probably can come up with a hundred different counts, and yet all of them are interesting for they show us how many different ways there are to consider the issue. -- Jean-Frederic Boisdet 9:30, 02 Jan 2006 (UTC)

Number of words
It's not correct to consider internationalisms and loanwords as being English words. Greek, Latin, French, Spanish etc loanwords ar not English words. So any language can borrow thousands of words from other languages and say that it`s the richest language in the world. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roberts7 (talk • contribs)


 * I disagree that internationalisms and loanwords cannot be English words. That is a prescriptive appoarch, which was used by old dictionaries to prescribe the proper use of words. But even old dictionaries regarded words obtained from other languages as English words, only specifying their derivation. I prefer the descriptive approach used by modern dictionaries. They only describe how a word is actually used, not how it should be used. If a word, from any source whatsoever, is used in ordinary English conversation, spoken or written, then it is an English word. Here I include words used between educated professionals who will frequently use words which would otherwise be rare if the totality of all English discourse was considered.


 * If you exclude foreign loanwords from English, then English cannot exist. Old English included a large percentage of Latin words, so many that most conversations could not occur without them (Britain was a Roman colony before Old English existed). Middle English became so in part due to a large influx of Old Norse and French words after the Viking invasions and the Battle of Hastings. Indeed the Norman conquerors were Viking settlers in the Normandy area of France, and French is a mixture of Latin and the Germanic language of invading Franks. Both Old English and Middle English are foreign languages relative to English because neither would be intelligible to a native English speaker, who easily understands your 'foreign loanwords'. — Joe Kress 21:15, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

"Global Language Monitor"
This article started as a puff for the "Global Language Monitor". Luckily it's that no longer, but it still has links to the "Global Language Monitor", whose "proprietary algorithm", whatever its value may be, starts work on a list of words that treats "nut" as two words (one for the thing that screws onto a bolt, one for what squirrels treasure) or one, that treats "nuts" as one word (crazy) or two or three (that plus the plurals), etc etc; we're not told.

To me, the Language Log article (which seems to have had no effect whatever on "GLM") makes it very clear that "GLM" is junk. I don't think it even merits a link, let alone serious discussion. May I remove it? -- Hoary 07:44, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Number of headwords in OED?
It says 500,000 here and 300,000 in the headword entry. Someone should clarify this... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.179.174.137 (talk) 21:30, 4 September 2007 (UTC)