The vocabulary of the English language is rapidly filling up with new lexical units. Scientists have calculated that an average of 15 new words appear per day, but not all of them take root in the language, but only those that are most widespread.

If not "selfie" in 2013, we would never have known that a self-shot had a specific title. Following him came the well-known today “bookfie”,"shelfie", "legsie" and others, which can often be found in social networks in the form of hashtags. If you are a person who does not complain about fantasy, you can come up with your own word ending in “sie”/“fie”, post it on a social network and see what the effect is.

Printed dictionaries and word counts

About 15 years ago you could buy an English dictionary containing 500 000 words At that time, such a number seemed quite decent even for a linguist, because, according to scientists, the average person uses about 5,000 words in his speech. That's what it's called active dictionary. Everyone else lexical units remain passive: we can recognize and understand them in texts, but not use them in everyday speech.

How many words do you need to know?

Now let's move on to the question of how many words are in English need to know. It all depends on how to talk, who to talk to and what topics to discuss. In order to communicate with a pen pal, 500-1000 words, including verbs, nouns and adjectives, will be enough. For comparison, the active vocabulary of a native speaker is from 15,000 to 40,000 words. However, it’s worth making a little reservation here so that every student of English doesn’t think that you can master a thousand words and chat freely. This thousand is different for everyone. And if you look into frequency dictionary, then it becomes clear that most vocabulary make up prepositions, pronouns, numerals, question words, which may not be used at all in conversation.

According to the authors of the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, in order to understand 80-90% of the text, you need 3,000 words, which approximately corresponds to the Intermediate level.

In order for words not to become passive, they must be used regularly - repeated at certain intervals. Even better is to work with flash cards, which allow you to repeat everything that has been covered at any time.

In order not to guess the meaning of phrases, but to know them for sure, you will need a little more units - approximately 5,000 - 6,000. With such a reserve, you can freely read books, watch films, and communicate on the most common topics.

GLM and new words in English

If we look at the GLM (Global Language Monitor), we can see how many words in the English language appear regularly and become popular. And this is neither more nor less than 1,041,258 (at the time of writing). And this number is constantly growing. Despite such a vocabulary boom, this does not mean that everyone will be able to actively use new words, so you should focus on the most frequently used units.

You may ask, how do words become popular, who popularizes them? Of course, the media and social networks. In order for a word to be included in the GLM list, it must be repeated at least 25,000 times, covering a certain breadth and depth of use. Depth is the form of words in the media, and breadth is its distribution throughout the world.

What words are popular today?

Bigly - extremely, very, strongly. It became popular after Donald Trump used a different meaning in his speech “I”m going to cut taxes bigly, and you”re going to raise taxes bigly. Social networks literally exploded from what they heard, discussing whether he really used this word in the right context. It later turned out that Trump used the expression “big league”, but this no longer had any meaning.

Below you can see the most popular words today:

Brexit - exit of Great Britain from the European Union;
non-binary - polysexuality, attraction to several genders;
memory care - fight against Alzheimer's disease;
texticate - write messages on social networks;
trumpism - the style of thinking and behavior of a Republican;
futebol is a variation on the theme of football. The world first saw this word in Brazil in 2011;
emoticons. smileys, emoji’s - emoticons (smiles) used by everyone in correspondence. Since 2013, these words have become especially popular;
Chinglish - Chinese-English. However, such words today are enough to understand that that same variable English is spreading around the world at lightning speed.

In December 2016, the expression Web 2.0 emerged, a technical term for a new generation of web products and services. Interestingly, the word 1,00,001 became “financial tsunami” - a global financial restructuring that came out of nowhere and cost trillions of dollars.

This term was preceded by the following words:

jai ho - long live victory (translation from Hindi);
N00b is a derogatory term for a newbie who makes unforgivable mistakes;
slumdog - a person living in the slums;
cloud computing - cloud computing;
carbon neutral - with a neutral carbon release rate;
slow food - movement against the system fast food;
octomom - mother of eight children Nadya Suleman;
greenwashing - green camouflage, a form of eco-marketing that uses methods that indicate the environmental friendliness of products;
defriend - remove from the list of friends, “unfriend”.

So how many basic words are there?

It is quite difficult to answer the question of how many basic words there are in the English language, since these very basic words can vary from person to person. You can select an average of 150-200 verbs and 500 nouns, connect them all with prepositions and pronouns and see what happens.

People who start learning English are often interested in the question of how many English words to learn per day. You shouldn’t overload yourself with 50 or 100 words a day, as you won’t last long; 10-15 words will be enough to simultaneously replenish your vocabulary and not lose your desire to learn English.

If you want to know the most up-to-date information, check it out. Thanks to the tutorial, you will master English without leaving home, and the articles will help answer all your questions.

Have you ever wondered how many words there are in the English language? Or maybe they even tried to count? If not, then they certainly sighed at the thought that they still needed to be learned. At the same time, you probably understood that the problem would not end until you learned to operate with all the knowledge no worse than a native speaker.

Take, for example, a small English-Russian reference book - it will contain order 30-50 thousand linguistic units . The well-known publication Mueller, however, is ready to boast 250 thousand. In this regard, paper publications are left far behind if you turn to Internet resources. For them, conquest 500,000 milestone- this is morning exercises, while others have gone much further. There's hardly anything that can compete with 3 million and 500 thousand English expressions in one of the most

This is all good, of course, but our question remains unanswered.

So, exact quantity It is impossible to specify words in English, because new ones appear every day. This happens, as you may have guessed, thanks to scientific inventions, the emergence of new things and the progress of humanity as a whole. After all, if he appeared new item, then you need to come up with a name for him, preferably one that no one has heard of.

There is an organization in Texas "Global Language Monitor", who devoted her activities to studying English vocabulary. So, June 10, 2009 was officially announced breaking the millionth milestone – Web 2.0 became that “anniversary” expression. The chief analyst of this organization even recorded exact time– 10.22 GMT.

A joint study by Harvard and Google confirms that the volume of the English language has conquered a million units. Their exact value amounted to 1, 022,000. Scientists have noticed that the growth rate is about 8,500 words per year, which is almost no different from the Global Language Monitor, which states that the total lexicon increases by one every 98 minutes.

Please note that each new language cell goes a long way in at least 25 thousand mentions in the media, various kinds literature and Internet communities before being recorded and officially recognized as "GLM". These are not the times of Shakespeare, when great writer and the poet increased the English language by 1500 expressions from its mere use in his works.

On at the moment English is steadily approaching 1.5 million. Does this mean that they will all have to be taught?

Of course not. The vocabulary of the English language, like any other, includes not only general vocabulary, but also scientific terms, slang, diminutives, interjections, abbreviations, jargon, vulgarisms, dialect variants etc. There is not a single drop of doubt that all of them will never be useful to us, and if we are objective, they will never be remembered.

According to linguistic research, the average educated Englishman or American uses about 15 thousand units, at the same time, the vocabulary of the English language can be stored in memory many times more. Another thing is whether you can extract from there if necessary necessary information. If you have just started studying native speech Shakespeare, Maugham and Dickens, then aim for at least 3-4 thousand to maintain a conversation in everyday situations. Reading and writing will require much more - up to 10-12 thousand.

Knowledge of English is required in many professions today. If it is not directly required by the employer, then, in most cases, you need it for personal purposes.

I constantly face the problem that I seem to already know a lot of words, but nevertheless, I have to constantly look into the dictionary. How many words are there in total? :)

How many words are there in English

In fact, the exact amount is very difficult to calculate. After all, each new word is born approximately every hour and a half. And besides, it is not entirely clear whether it is worth counting all the word forms of each word, which makes the task very difficult. Philologists wonder whether slang words are worth taking into account.

And, of course, it is very difficult to keep track of the emergence of new words. However, I found information about a company called GLM that does just that. According to her data, there are 1,004,010 words in the English language. A lot, right?

For comparison, it is believed that the Russian language has 500,000 words. This is 2 times less than in English. And I think the rate at which new words are introduced in the "high and mighty" is much slower than in English.

In addition, I wondered what a word needs to be officially introduced as new. After all, someone can simply utter a non-existent word in an interview. So what, it will appear in online dictionaries? No. It's not that simple. For a word to become officially registered, it must be mentioned on social networks about 25 thousand times.

Which languages have the most words?

The same English language comes first. But who follows? One American newspaper publication compiled a small list. Here is a list of the first four places after English:

Chinese- about five hundred thousand words. This number includes all kinds of dialects.
Japanese- two hundred thirty thousand words.
Spanish- two hundred twenty-five thousand words.
And only in fourth place is the Russian language - one hundred and ninety-five thousand words. At the top I wrote that there are about 500 thousand words in the Russian language. Yes, one source states exactly that. But USA Today thinks differently.

To put it roughly, for example, “web” in modern English means “web” and “Internet”. At the same time, there is also an abbreviation word “internet”, therefore many (especially Russian) academics do not take into account “web” as two words. Although at the same time they may well mean “ball”, “ball”, “ball” and other derivatives by case, like unique words, each of which adds +1 to the “counter” of the Great and Mighty.

And Chinese doesn’t have words at all in our traditional understanding; they have ideograms. Hieroglyphs change meaning depending on their relative location, forming new lexemes. The system is so complex that even the name in the passport can be written in several in different ways. And if you try to parse it into “words”, a name that is quite standard for us can mean “electric dragon’s ass heavenly mountains"or "chest of unwashed sticks of omnipotence." For this reason, by the way, auto translators from Chinese produce such crap - on Ali, in particular. This is the language of contexts, and if you translate from it into European languages At the very least it will be possible without loss of meaning, but it is not possible to decompose it into a certain number of words due to the absence of this concept itself in the structure of the language.

So, all these discrepancies in attempts to “compare” even such close (on a planetary scale) Russian and English, or French and Spanish, lead to the fact that different sources(quite authoritative) the number of words in a language can differ significantly and even by orders of magnitude. So the topic is controversial and conflicting, because... everyone looks from their own bell tower and counts differently.

Just accept that this is one of the few scientific issues, any answer to which will be someone’s ridiculous propaganda or, more likely, just a mistake.

It is, of course, impossible to give an exact number for a number of reasons. But approximate data have long been summarized and analyzed by linguists. I will write about the two languages with which I work the most.

English. Most linguists agree that the language of Shakespeare and Dickens contains approximately 1 million words. Depending on how and what exactly to count, the approximate error is “up to a quarter of a million.” Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged contains 470,000 dictionary entries(not words, please note). The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition - about the same.

Russian language. Ozhegov’s dictionary contains more than 70,000 words. Ushakov’s dictionary contains more than 90,000. BTS contains approximately 130,000 words. These figures cover, according to data, approximately 50% of all words recorded in the large dictionary card index (LDR) of the Institute for Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IL RAS). This allows, again, to roughly estimate the total number.

>How many words are there in English?

How many words are there in English and how many do you need to know to communicate?

Here you can find out how many words there are in English.

How many words are there in English?

This question is very popular among people learning English, since every student tries to expand their vocabulary, and, naturally, sooner or later everyone asks the question: I wonder how many words there are in English?

In fact, no one will give you an exact answer to this question for the reason that there is no answer to it. If you look at different statistics, you may be surprised because the numbers can be different everywhere. This is because there are several methods for counting words. According to one, only words are counted, according to another, words and word forms, and according to the third, something else.

However, an organization has been founded in the United States that monitors the spread English words. It's called Global Language Monitor (GLM). The tasks of this organization include counting words and monitoring the emergence of new language formations. GLM works with generally accepted dictionaries and also monitors the emergence of new words in the media, social networks, and literature.

According to the latest data from this organization, in the English language there are 1,019,729 words.

Moreover, GLM also provides other interesting data. A new word appears in the English language every 98 minutes. If you count it in days, you get about 15 words a day.

Another interesting fact: for a word to receive the status of “new”, it must be seen in literature, the media, and the Internet at least 25,000 times. Only after this is it included in the English dictionary.

How many words do you need to know to communicate?

If you are interested in the question of how many words you need to learn in order to communicate, then linguists say that for this you need to know 1 500 most common words, For free communication you need to know at least 5 000 words, and to read books or news, no less 10 000 words