How many written words are there in the english dictionary?

Question

please provide which dictionary you are using and what version.

Answer 1

Not an easy question to answer:
"How many in the language and how many
does any one person know?

One of the more common questions that arrive for the Q&A section asks how many words there are in the English language. Almost as common are requests for the average size of a person’s vocabulary. These sound like easy questions; I have to tell you that they’re indeed easy to ask. But they’re almost impossible to answer satisfactorily, because it all depends what you mean by word and by vocabulary (or even English).
What we mean by word sounds obvious, but it’s not. Take a verb like climb. The rules of English allow you to generate the forms climbs, climbed, climbable, and climbing, the nouns climb and climber (and their plurals climbs and climbers), compounds such as climb-down and climbing frame, and phrasal verbs like climb on, climb over, and climb down. Now, here’s the question you’ve got to answer: are all these distinct words, or do you lump them all together under climb?
That this is not a trivial question can be proved by looking at half a dozen current dictionaries. You won’t find two that agree on what to list. Almost every word in the language has this fuzzy penumbra of inflected forms, separate senses and compounds, some to a much greater extent than climb. To take a famous case, the entry for set in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to 60,000 words. The noun alone has 47 separate senses listed. Are all these distinct words?
And in a wider sense, what do you include in your list of words? Do you count all the regional variations of English? Or slang? Dialect? Family or private language? Proper names and the names of places? And what about abbreviations? The biggest dictionary of them has more than 400,000 entries—do you count them all as words? And what about informal and formal names for living things? The wood louse is known in Britain by many local names—tiggy-hog, cheeselog, pill bug, chiggy pig, and rolypoly among others. Are these all to be counted as separate words? And, to take a more specialist example, is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the formal name for bread yeast, to be counted as a word (or perhaps two)? If you say yes, you’ve got to add another couple of million such names to the English-language word count. And what about medical terms, such as syncytiotrophoblastic or holoprosencephaly, that few of us ever encounter?
The other difficult term is vocabulary. What counts as a word that somebody knows? Is it one that a person uses regularly and accurately? Or perhaps one that will be correctly recognised—say in written text—but not used? Or perhaps one that will be understood in context but which the person may not easily be able to define? This distinction between what linguists call active and passive vocabularies is hard to measure, and it skews estimates.
The problem doesn’t stop there. English speakers not only know words, they know word-forming elements, such as the ending -phobia for some irrational fear. A journalist rushing to meet a deadline might take a word he knows, like Serb, and tack on the ending to make Serbophobia. He’s just added a word to the language (probably only temporarily), but can he really be said to have that word in his vocabulary? If nobody ever uses it again, can we legitimately count it? By reversing the coining process, a reader of the newspaper can easily work out the word’s origin and meaning. Has the reader also added a word to his vocabulary?
Can you now see why estimates of the total number of words in the English language and in a person’s vocabulary are so difficult to make, and why they vary so much one from another? David Crystal, in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, suggests that there must be at least a million words in the language. Tom McArthur, in the Oxford Companion to the English Language, comes up with a similar figure. David Crystal further says that if you allow all scientific terms the total could easily reach two million (this doesn’t count the formal names for organisms I spoke about earlier, just technical vocabulary)."

Probably the greatest compendium of English words is to be found in the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary.
"The Oxford English Dictionary is widely acknowledged to be the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of English in the world. It also traces the evolution of more than 600,000 words over the last 1,500 years through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of sources: from classic literature and periodicals to film scripts and pop songs.

"The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. The OED has a unique historical focus. Accompanying each definition is a chronologically arranged group of quotations that trace the usage of words, and show the contexts in which they can be used. The quotations are drawn from a huge variety of international sources - literary, scholarly, technical, popular - and represent authors as disparate as Geoffrey Chaucer and Erica Jong, William Shakespeare and Raymond Chandler, Charles Darwin and John Le Carré. In all, nearly 2.5 million quotations can be found in the OED.

The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis, listings of variant spellings, and shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The Second Edition of the OED is currently available as a 20-volume print edition, on CD-ROM, and now also online. Updated quarterly with at least 1000 new and revised entries, OED Online offers unparalleled access to the 'greatest continuing work of scholarship that this century has produced' (Newsweek)."

Here are some facts:
Second Edition (1989)
Size:20 volumes, 21,730 pages
Publication date: 1989
Weight of text:62.6 kilos or 137.72 lbs.
Amount of ink used to print complete run: 2,830 kilos or 6,243 lbs.
Number of words in entire text:59 million
Number of printed characters:350 million
Number of different typographical
characters used in text: approx.: 750 (660 special plus approx. 90 on regular keyboard)
Equivalent person years used to 'key in' text to convert to machine-readable form:120
Equivalent person years to proof-read text:60
Number of megabytes of electronic storage required for text:540
Number of entries:291,500
Number of main entries:231,100
Number of main entries for obsolete words:47,100
Number of main entries for spurious words:240
Number of main entries for non-naturalized words:12,200
Longest entry in Dictionary:the verb 'set' with over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words or 326,000 characters
Number of quotations:2,436,600
Most frequently quoted work
(in various full and partial version, and translations):Bible (est. 25,000 quotations)
Most frequently quoted single author:Shakespeare (approx. 33,300 quotations)
Most frequently quoted single work of Shakespeare:Hamlet (almost 1,600 quotations)
Percentage of quotations by centuries:
20th century - 20 per cent
19th century - 31
18th century - 11
17th century - 16
16th century - 10
15th century - 4.5
14th century - 3.5
13th century - 1
1st to 12th centuries - 1
Undated (see note) - 0.5


Note: 'Undated' includes approximately 1,250 quotations from Beowulf, with the balance consisting of proverbs, nursery rhymes, 'made up' illustrations, and references to the appearance of word forms 'in mod. Dicts.'

All the above figures should be regarded as approximate.

Answer 2

Depends on what you mean by "the dictionary" If I take that literally then the question is impossible to answer as there is no definitive English dictionary. There are many, many of them.

The one I have in front of me is the Encarta Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. It claims to have over 400,000 words, phrases and definitions in it. As a general rule, an unabridged dictionary will have the most words in it.

Answer 3

3........The English Dictionary

Answer 4

You can't get a dictionary?

Answer 5

Great question...perhaps you could count them and let us know.

Answer 6

try google but i doubt it.

Answer 7

none! - they are all typed x