Christine's Hello Column

june 2006

Hello!

How many words are there in the English language? I’ve often been asked but it’s a tough question to answer. For a start, what do you define as a word? There’s the word word, but there are also words, wordy, wordier, wordiest, wordless, wordlessly – do you count them all?

Then there are obsolete words, slang and jargon, plus many new words, including computer-based technology. Foreign words are constantly being scooped up and adapted to English.

Luckily, somebody has made these decisions. There’s a linguistic consultancy, based in San Diego, called the GLM (Global Language Monitor) that is counting words in English use. It started off with a base vocabulary taken from the major dictionaries that contain the historic core of the language.

Then it created a formula that measures the languages found in print, electronic media, radio and television. By using this it can tell how fast new words are being created and can also follow the rate that foreign words are being absorbed into English.

They predict that the English language will soon create its millionth word., and it will happen in the next few months.

The language used by the most people in the world is Mandarin Chinese, spoken by over a billion. But English, which is spoken by roughly 500 million, is the most widely spread language, which is why English is often the lingua franca used in business, academic conferences, air-traffic control etc. Spanish apparently has 225,000 words in contemporary use, and the largest German dictionary contains about 200,000 words (although they tend to be much longer than ours). Russian has just reached 125,000 and French has only 100,000.

However, we don’t use that many words every day - the average vocabulary of an educated English-speaking person is between 24,000 and 30,000.

And most of them can be found in our crosswords.

Happy puzzling!