how many words are there in English?

Answer 1

The 1998 10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 215,000 definitions
From Library Journal
Despite a change in title additional 10,000 new meanings and words
http://www.amazon.com/Merriam-Websters-Collegiate-Dictionary-Merriam-Websters/dp/0877797099

215,000
10,000= 225,000
P.S. This must be the reason they say the English language is hard to learn.

Answer 2

English is a big language - there are more than 1,000,000 words, more than 10 times the number of words in the French language, though many of the words are scientific, or jargon, or specialised words and are not necessary for most folks

Answer 3

There is no single sensible answer to this question. It is impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it is so hard to decide what counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (dogs plural noun, dogs present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since we might also find hot-dog or even hotdog?

It is also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

Answer 4

First learn the language and then count how many words have you find :-)

Answer 5

26 letters in the alphabet, 5 vowels+y, that's a lot of combinations for words some 1 letter some lotsa letters.

Answer 6

More than 20,000, if you want exact numbers its impossible because everyday new words are created

Answer 7

gin
english
gel
sin
sine
shine
hen
hens
gels
gins
his
she
glen
glens
nie
lie
lies
hie
hies
lens
line
lines

uhmmm...i count 22

Answer 8

No right or wrong answer. There are......?????????????????????????????????