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 language has increased over the last thousand years by about 20 times. 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 using mobile phone with a built-in camera for photographing 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 they be considered in different words English and American spellings of the word “color” (“color” and “colour”)? 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.

>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 his vocabulary to the maximum, 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 is 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, in social networks, 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 the 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

How many words are there in Russian and how many words are there in English?

Threatening attempts to "debunk the myths about the great and mighty"

It is well known that the vocabulary of different languages ​​is not the same. Lexicon civilized man may be tens of times greater than the vocabulary of a representative of some wild African tribe. It is also clear that within the same language, the vocabulary of different speakers varies greatly: a child and an adult, a janitor and a professor... In any case, no one doubts that a more extensive vocabulary is always associated with stock of knowledge and intellectual superiority. And now attention: what would you think if you were officially told that our Russian language is savage, contains five times less words than English? Of course, they would indignantly dispute this nonsense! However, such a “scientific opinion” is repeatedly broadcast in the media. This cannot but be alarming.

The last time this statement was heard on television was in 2011. But it is easier to discuss and analyze not television programs, but printed materials, which are easier to read (for example, on the Internet). So, you can look into the archives of the journal “Science and Life”. In the 6th issue of 2009, a doctor of philological sciences (!), a certain Miloslavsky, was published under the mocking title “The Great, Mighty Russian Language”. In it, the author “debunks myths” about the Russian language. In particular, it is stated that “according to very rough estimates, the dictionaries of the English literary language contain about 400 thousand words, German - about 250 thousand, Russian - about 150 thousand.” From which it is proposed to draw the conclusion that “the wealth of the Russian language is a myth” (almost a verbatim quote). In general, the article was written in the spirit of self-spitting, characteristic of the early 90s; I was even somewhat struck by its anachronism. Not to mention completely unscientific.

The author did not even mention the difficulties and problems of word counting and, in general, the problem of the possibility and appropriateness of any scientific definition and comparisons vocabulary entire languages. I consider it necessary to raise the following objections.

1) B different cultures the criteria for the “admission” of words in literary language. In the continental tradition, centralized planning dominates, while the Anglo-Saxons have a market element in everything (informal approach). For example, among the French, vocabulary is strictly censored by a body such as the Academie Francais (Academy of the French Language). She decides which words belong to literary French and which do not. Due to such censorship, a situation has arisen where it is believed that the French language, with all its rich literature, contains no more than 150,000-200,000 words. In English, anyone can come up with a word and immediately enter it into the language. So, Shakespeare wrote that he came up with about 1.7 thousand words from his writer's vocabulary of 21 thousand words. This, by the way, is a huge achievement for a writer; it is exceeded only by our Pushkin: 24 thousand words, an absolute and unsurpassed individual record for an active dictionary of all times - see "Dictionary of the Pushkin Language" in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961) . Most educated Europeans actively use no more than 8-10 thousand words, and passively - 50 thousand or more.

Obviously, the 150,000 Russian words named by the author of that article is a slightly rounded volume of the well-known Large Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (BAS), which in the 1970 edition in 17 volumes totaled 131,257 words. And the English 400,000 are, apparently, the latest editions of Oxford and Webster. Moreover, in the penultimate editions of these same English dictionaries there were several times fewer words (you can look up the specifics on the Internet). Where does this increase come from and why do their dictionaries contain more words than ours? The first reason is a shameless count of archaisms that modern Englishmen and Americans, of course, do not know. In the English philological tradition, the vocabulary of modern English is considered to be all words since the time of Shakespeare (a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov). In the Russian tradition, all pre-Petrine, and at the suggestion of the famous lexicographer Ushakov, even pre-Pushkin vocabulary is considered ancient or old Russian.

The second reason is that the criteria for the “acceptance” of new words into the language have become even less strict. Approaches to the English language are becoming more and more daring, and the assessments appearing on the Internet are simply fantastic. Thus, the GLM agency (Global Language Monitor, website www.languagemonitor.com) reports the appearance of... the millionth word in the English language! By which word is considered the millionth, it is immediately clear what kind of garbage dump they are trying to pass off the English language as: this is the “word” of Web 2.0! And this is along with the fact that (the) web is considered a separate word. Apparently, Web 1.0 was also considered a separate word somewhere! Moreover, they are not shy about counting phrases as words: “financial tsunami” - “Financial tsunami” was counted as the 1,000,001st word. In this case, in the Russian language, along with the words “financial” and “tsunami”, there is the word “financial tsunami”, which can be counted. However, the purists who compiled the BAS are unlikely to have included the word “tsunami” in it, since it is a foreign borrowing (for this, see the next paragraph below).

2) English not only creates its own, but also very actively borrows foreign words from languages ​​all over the world. We complain about the dominance of English borrowings, but that layer of scientific, technical and business vocabulary, which penetrated into our language with the fall of the Iron Curtain, is only a pitiful handful compared to the active borrowings produced by the English language without any false restraint. It has been half French since the time of William the Conqueror. It turns out that we are borrowing what we borrowed! Or, figuratively speaking, we repurchase what we bought. And now, when millions of people in multinational companies communicate in English, which is not their native language, whole layers of vocabulary are emerging: “Chinese English”, “Latin American English”, “Japanese English”. These layers of vocabulary belong to the so-called occasionalisms.

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 need 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 language units. The famous Mueller publication, however, is ready to boast 250 thousand. In this regard, paper publications are left far behind if you turn to Internet resources. For them it's conquest 500,000 milestone- This morning work-out, 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, It is impossible to indicate the exact number of 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 in general. 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 the 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 this 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 English 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, if necessary, extract from there necessary information. If you have just started studying the native speech of 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 appearance 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 is 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 is coming next? One American newspaper publication compiled a small list. Here is a list of the first four places after English:

1. Chinese- about five hundred thousand words. This number includes all kinds of dialects.
2. Japanese language - two hundred thirty thousand words.
3. Spanish - two hundred twenty-five thousand words.
4. And only in fourth place Russian is coming 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.