How Many Words in English and Other Languages

Wednesday, January 06 2010

Lately my personal focus has been on writing. In early November of this year I grudgingly gave up on a novel I had been procrastinating my way through for about ten years ( yes ten ). You see the novel was really interesting when I started, but just kept falling off my radar.

Though I was almost done I decided to let it go and start something new. Today I’m at 95,000+ words with little more than a chapter to go on my new novel. In the course of doing all this writing I’ve been paying a lot of attention to what other writers are doing. I recently read that there are over 600k words in the English language, while other languages all have significantly less.

I decided to try and verify that statement. The answer is rather surprising. Though it is commonly agreed that English has more words, the exact count is anywhere from 100k to over a million depending on what you can as a word and what your source is.

The same goes for other languages. French especially is referenced as having over a million a number of places i checked, though Spanish comes in at a svelte 100k.

The only thing that most people seem to agree upon is that a typical English speaker will have about 20,000 words, though I found at least one reference where a study suggested that number was way too low. I’m guessing that my book has a lot less than 20k words. When I’m done I’m going to have to parse it and figure out how many distinct words I used.