Despite learning German for three years, and practising nearly every day, they still couldn't seem to retain more than words. To work out how many words you need to know to be able to speak a second language we decided to look into how many words we know in our first language, in our case English. We considered dusting off the dictionary and going from A1 to Zyzzyva, however, there are an estimated , words currently in use in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, not to mention 47, obsolete words.
To quote a well-known internet meme "ain't nobody got time for that". What we needed was a mathematical cheat. Fortunately for us somebody beat us to it. Linguists Paul Nation and John Read who doesn't love a bit of nominative determinism?
Their theory is that if you count up how many of the 50 words you understand and multiply the total by you are able to estimate your total English vocabulary. Words start off simply enough; dog, editor, immense but they quickly become more obscure, for example would you know how to use "oleaginous" or "cowsucker" in a sentence?
Hint: the latter doesn't have anything to do with cows And now Paul's free English vocabulary size test, using words, is available online. Stuart Webb, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Western Ontario, has studied the process of learning vocabulary or - to give it its sexier name - language acquisition. He discovered that it is incredibly difficult for a language learner to ever know as many words as a native speaker.
Typically native speakers know 15, to 20, word families - or lemmas - in their first language. We've Added New Words! How many words are in the English language? It would seem like a simple question, but the answer is anything but. New words are entering the language all the time.
At the same time, existing words evolve. A bird or social media? And slang words come and go. Do we count VSCO girl as a word if it ends up not sticking around?
To boot, English loves loanwords : is it time to count despacito as an English word? What about nonce words —those one-off, made-up, throwaway words that are perfectly understandable in the moment? Say, snacktabulous. Linguistically speaking, all these questions only scratch the surface. So, how many words are in the English language?
The answer to this question is hotly debated in linguistics. Take run. But take a second to list its different word forms: runs , running , ran. Do these count as separate words in our total? Or should we just count the umbrella lexeme run?
The idea of a lexeme , or one vocabulary item, brings us to phrases : Black Lives Matter , emotional support animal , pre-main sequence stars. We think of them as units, but do we count them as single words? And what about the loanwords we mentioned above? For translation to or from English , talk to a competent multilingual translator; many offer online service provision, too. Learning and translating English is no small feat; the Oxford Dictionary currently contains over , tokens currently used by English-speakers.
This is in comparison to other languages, such as Spanish and French which each has around , tokens in their native tongue. It should be mentioned that Russian has over , tokens currently in their diction, while Italians use a total of around , tokens.
Know, however, that most people use and recognize a mere fraction of the total tokens in their primary vernacular; so how many do most know, on average? Most speakers regularly use an average of 20, , though they may have a passive vocabulary of around twice that number. The Oxford Dictionary lists around that begin with x, though online dictionaries only document around What about consecutive vowels? Yes, this is an odd and infrequently occurring vocabulary phenomena, but it does happen.
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