What Made The Crocodile Cry by Susie Dent

Author:Susie Dent [Dent, Susie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199574155
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

How many words are there in English?

Language is first and foremost a spoken medium—fewer than a thousand of the world’s 6,800 languages have writing systems—and as such the number of words it contains and produces at any one moment is infinite. Dictionaries of current English can only hope to provide a snapshot of a language at a given time. There is as a result no definitive answer to this question, and that’s perhaps as it should be, given the fluidity and unpredictability of English itself. The Oxford English Dictionary, a permanent record of the language—once a word is in, it stays in—has approximately 600,000 words and derivatives of those words, but it is necessarily very far from exhaustive, for words need to prove themselves before they can earn a place.

In 2009 there was a lot of attention given to the claim that English was about to reach its millionth word (the chosen one, ‘Web 2.0’, had been around for some time). A news-grabbing claim, certainly, but an unlikely one. English probably exceeded a million words some years ago. The main problem in trying to quantify its vocabulary is how to agree the basics: what is a word? Do you include terms such as ‘text’ that can mean a multitude of things, can be a verb and a noun, and that has numerous spin-off forms such as ‘texter’, ‘texting’, ‘text-walking’, etc.? And how about obsolete words, or highly specialized and scientific ones?

What does seem likely is that English has more words than other comparable world languages. Throughout its history it has been exposed to an enormous number of influences—German, Dutch, Norman French, Hindi, and Latin, to name just a few. It continues to hoover up foreign words and has shown itself to be readily adaptable to different cultures across the world. The rate with which global ‘Englishes’ are being developed suggests that the size of the language is set to expand still further rather than diminish.

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