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

"The language developed dynamically until October revolution. English and Russian dictionaries were, as they say, neck and neck until the beginning of the twentieth century. Each of them contained approximately 200 thousand words.
When Webster's Dictionary was published in 1934, it already had 600 thousand words. And in 1940 the most complete for Soviet era Ushakov's dictionary contained only 80 thousand words.
Today this gap is only getting worse. With the degeneration of the language, our life also degenerates; the emotional nuances and moral concepts that abounded in the Russian language in the 19th century disappear,” Epstein said.

He reported that in the academic dictionary of the Russian language in 1847 there were 160 words with the root “lyub”, and in modern dictionaries only 40 such words. And yet, for a century and a half, not a single new word with this root has appeared.

According to him, English is the donor language, and Russian is the importer.

“In English there are about a million words, in modern Russian, according to the most complete dictionaries, no more than 150 thousand,” Epstein noted.

We don’t even touch on the computer sphere: it is entirely English.

Original taken from aillarionov V
The English language has 1 million words. How many words are there in Russian?

Belatedly discovered some old news.

English passed the Million Word mark earlier today, June 10 at 10:22 am GMT
The Global Language Monitor announced today that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000 th English word or phrase added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months…

At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.

These are the fifteen finalists for the one millionth English word, all of which have met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations.
1,000,000: Web 2.0 - The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.
999,999: Jai Ho! - The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished.” Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”.
999,998: N00b — From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.
999,997: Slumdog - a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.
999,996: Cloud Computing - The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage.
999,995: Carbon Neutral - One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change.
999,994: Slow Food — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).
999,993: Octomom - The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets.
999,992: Greenwashing - Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly.
999,991: Sexting - Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.
999,990: Shovel Ready - Projects are ready to begin immediately upon the release of federal stimulus funds...

In addition, the 1,000,001 st word is Financial Tsunami - The global financial restructuring that seemingly swept out of nowhere, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets, in a matter of months
Each word was analyzed to determine which depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as number of appearances in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and social media (such as Twitter and YouTube). The Word with the highest PQI score was considered the 1,000,000th English language word. The Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) is used to track and analyze word usage.
Global Language Monitor has been tracking English word creation since 2003. Once it identifies new words (or neologisms) it measures their extent and depth of usage with its PQI technology.
http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/1000000th-english-word-announced

On October 4, 2009 at English language already 1002116 words.
http://www.languagemonitor.com/

How many words are there in modern Russian?
At what rate does the number of words in it increase?
Is anyone monitoring it?

P.S.
So far the maximum estimate is V. Dahl's Dictionary, about 200 thousand words.

Clarification of the linguistic richness of “The Great and Mighty” in the comments of A. Illarionov here:

English became the first language in which lexicon has crossed the million mark, said the American research group The Global Language Monitor.

No existing language has such a large vocabulary as English. Its vocabulary was replenished over 1.5 thousand years. And now the serial number equal to a million has received the word "Web 2.0".

But before the word of the new generation was recognized, it had to appear in the texts 25 thousand times (only in this case does any designation have the right to the status of a word). The Global Language Monitor, which monitors the use of new terms by Internet users, confirmed that the word appears in search queries more than 25 thousand times and has become commonly used over the past six months. This fact was recorded on June 10, 2009.

Global Language Monitor is based in California and has “observers” in almost all parts of the world, writes Itar-Tass. They closely monitor the appearance of any neologisms, sending the latest data to the central office of the service. According to their calculations, the number of words in modern English has increased approximately 20 times over the last thousand years. It was expected that the vocabulary would exceed a million back in 2006 (at that time the actively expanding English dictionary totaled 986 thousand 120 words). But this happened only three years later.

It was assumed that the word would come from hybrids of the English language - Chainglish, Hinglish or Spanglish. Although the possibility of word penetration from youth subculture or web slang, which is what happened.

During the monitoring of neologisms, it was noted Special attention to the words: “snaparazzi” - people who use a mobile phone with a built-in camera to take pictures of celebrities; “podcast” is a digital recording of radio and other programs that can be downloaded from the Internet for later listening; and “misunderestimation,” as George W. Bush called a flagrant underestimation of the threat and capabilities of international terrorism after the tragic events in September 2001. And from China they learned the word “drinkti”, which means a tea break in a small trading shop.

Of course, not all neologisms end up in the Oxford Dictionary, but many of them confidently enter everyday speech. English has become a kind of lingua franca - a universal medium interethnic communication in many fields of activity. In this sense, it has long fulfilled the function that they once wanted to assign to the now half-forgotten Esperanto. And since “English” is very widespread, it is more open to new borrowings than other languages.

Scientists have found that Shakespeare used from 20 to 24 thousand words in all his works, 1,700 of which he invented himself. More than 50 Shakespearean neologisms are still used today. In order to understand what a million words are, it is enough to provide some scientifically proven data. For example, an adult native speaker of English, depending on the level of education, uses from 10 to 50 thousand lexemes in his speech. The average Englishman, American, Canadian, etc. know the meaning of about 75 thousand words, but not everyone actively uses them. Finally, in the dictionary of a baby aged one and a half to two years there are no more than five dozen speech units.

And although scientists claim that English has become the first millionaire language, this can be doubted. One of the world's most respected specialists in English philology, British academician David Crystal, is convinced that “inventorying” the lexicon is generally a pointless undertaking. Should we count, say, acronyms like CNN or IBM as words? Can the English and American spellings of the word “color” (“color” and “colour”) be considered different words? Is it necessary to include scientific terms for the classification of which Latin is used in general statistics? In addition, it is questioned whether a designation containing numbers can be called a “word” (Web 2.0)? Most likely it is a phrase. Crystal estimates that the English vocabulary is growing more slowly than The Global Language Monitor estimates, at about a thousand new words per year. But since there are no other, more reliable calculations, and no statistics on our native Russian language either. All you have to do is trust the research and calculations American group researchers.

Every year the number of words in the English language is growing: 14.7 lexical units appear per day. Much has changed in the English language since the days of Shakespeare, who used an average of 20,000 words in his works. Some words are practically not used today, but few people still know about those that have appeared again.

It is quite difficult to accurately answer the question about the number of words in the English language, since this number is constantly growing. Even a dozen years ago the number in 500 000 words for English language learners seemed like an ominous number, but now students react more easily to growing numbers, realizing that they won’t be able to cover all the words, and why would they?

The main fixator of vocabulary in English is “ Global Language Monitor"(GLM), the same organization records every new word that appears in magazines and newspapers, scientific and fiction literature, as well as on the Internet, namely in in social networks, blogs, podcasts.

And if you still can’t wait to find out the word count, then according to “ GLM» on January 1, 2016 there were 1 035 877 .

What a surprise it was that the top word of 2015 was “ microaggression”, and the most popular expression is “ migrant crisis" I think everyone understands why these words became popular. “ Microaggression” is a scientific term that has taken over all European and American tabloids, but “ migrant crisis” is an expression describing the movement of more than a million refugees from the Middle East (mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan), as well as from North Africa to Europe. This migration is the largest since World War II.

2014 was characterized by completely different words and expressions, and the vector of words did not even come close to political events in the world. Word " emoji” has captured the hearts of millions of people on the planet, so today even toddlers know what it is (if you are no longer a toddler, but still don’t know what we’re talking about, then we’ll suggest - an ideogram, an emoticon or a smile).

The English language continues to confidently stride across the planet, allowing words to penetrate deeper and deeper into every sphere of activity and into the world consciousness. So, the expression “ climate changing”, used with the ending “ing”, indicates continued climate change. Far from a new word “ refugee” – refugee, is again heard more and more often, describing migrants who were forced to leave their homes because of the war.

“Content” is a buzzword denoting information, material. Popular words of 2015 also included “ affluenza” – combination “ affluence” + “influenza” = affluence + flu, actually referring to healthy, wealthy people who are plagued by lack of motivation, guilt and a sense of isolation. ” Opioids” – in the United States, many people die from opioid painkillers and heroin more people than from cars and gun violence.

Among the common expressions of 2015 there is also “ digital darkness” (digital darkness) is what can happen if we stop accessing digital information, so keep paper copies of your favorite photos just in case.

How do words become popular?

In order to be included in the GLM list, a word must meet certain requirements:

Depth determined by the appearance in various forms in the media, latitude– spreading the word throughout the world, not limited to specific area activities.

Today, popular words include not only the achievements of science and technology, not only the hybrids “spanglish”, “danglish” and others, but also youth slang, as well as web slang.

Note that in everyday life of a native speaker there are approximately 50,000 – 70,000 words, many of which are practically not used. For a person just about to master foreign language, at the initial stage it will be enough to learn 3 000 – 5 000 words Ideally, to read literature, understand what is happening and fully communicate, you need to remember 15 000 – 17 000 lexical units.

This is interesting:

To type all the words in the English language, a person would need 744 days, assuming an eight-hour workday and a ten-minute break per hour. However, the vocabulary will be replenished and you will have to spend much more time, namely 2 years 135 days and 4 hours.

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 on 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. This is what is called an active dictionary. All other 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 you need to know in English. 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 at the frequency dictionary, it becomes clear that most of the vocabulary consists of 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. Later it 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 - a movement against the fast food system;
• 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.