How many words are in the English language?
No one knows exactly, but the Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 600,000 word forms, and about 170,000 words are in current use. A typical adult knows about 20,000 to 35,000 words.
Counting words is tricky. Should run as a noun and run as a verb count as one word or two? What about plurals, technical terms, slang and words borrowed from other languages? Different dictionaries make different choices. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1989, contained about 171,000 words in current use and 47,000 obsolete ones.
English keeps growing, adding hundreds or thousands of new words each year from technology, culture and other languages, such as selfie, emoji and podcast. Words also fall out of use over time.
How many do people use?
Studies suggest native English-speaking adults know roughly 20,000 to 35,000 word families. In daily life, people use far fewer. The most common 1,000 words make up about 85 percent of everyday speech. Shakespeare used about 30,000 different words in his works.
Did You Know?
English has a very large vocabulary partly because it absorbed many words from Latin, French, Norse and Greek while keeping its Germanic roots.