Their theory is that if you count up how many of the 50 words you understand and multiply the total by you are able to estimate your total English vocabulary. Words start off simply enough; dog, editor, immense but they quickly become more obscure, for example would you know how to use "oleaginous" or "cowsucker" in a sentence? Hint: the latter doesn't have anything to do with cows And now Paul's free English vocabulary size test, using words, is available online.
Stuart Webb, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Western Ontario, has studied the process of learning vocabulary or - to give it its sexier name - language acquisition. He discovered that it is incredibly difficult for a language learner to ever know as many words as a native speaker. Typically native speakers know 15, to 20, word families - or lemmas - in their first language. So does someone who can hold a decent conversation in a second language know 15, to 20, words?
Is this a realistic goal for our listener to aim for? Prof Webb found that people who have been studying languages in a traditional setting - say French in Britain or English in Japan - often struggle to learn more than 2, to 3, words, even after years of study.
In fact, a study in Taiwan showed that after nine years of learning a foreign language half of the students failed to learn the most frequently-used 1, words. And that is the key, the frequency with which the words you learn appear in day-to-day use in the language you're learning. You don't need to know all of the words in a language: for example it seems unlikely that anyone reading this has suffered from not knowing that "Zyzzyva" is a kind of tropical weevil and not a Spice Girls lyric.
So which words should we learn? Today, online dictionaries allow us to enter and document English like never before! This allows dictionaries to keep growing and expanding beyond their published editions. Digital technology lets us capture words like never before, too.
A corpus is yet another way to capture a snapshot of the English language. Corpus most commonly refers to a large or comprehensive collection of creative works, such as all of the writings of a particular author. The word is used in a more specific way in linguistics to refer to an entire set of a particular linguistic element within a language, such as words. One popular corpus is the Corpus of Contemporary American English , which contains more than 1 billion words drawn from magazines, TV shows, blogs, and more sources, but these include multiple instances of the same word.
According to the Global Language Monitor , which tracks language usage trends, the English language currently tops a whopping 1 million distinct words. Perhaps the answer in this case is a different question: how many words do speakers of a language know?
That answer is similarly murky, but according to at least one study, the average year-old native English speaker knows an average of 42, words. In a interview with the BBC, lexicographer Susie Dent estimated that while an English speaker may know around 40, words, they only actively use about 20, of them. Language and words are always changing, so it would be next to impossible to pin down an ever-evolving number. But now for t he good news: that means even at the low end of estimations, there are far more words for most people to discover.
Feedback Tired of Typos? Word of the Day. Meanings Meanings. What even is a word , anyways? Curious about which words English has taken from other languages? Read about them here. How many words are in the dictionary? How do you get a new word in a dictionary? You make a good point of only taking the stem word into account. There are so many ways to interpret the question and therefore, a multitude of answers and opinions that can come from it! Hello everyone. Some friends have commented on the issue with ethnic prejudices!
Of course, figures like million words are incorrect. Wiesbaden , French, Russian and English. The number of original Persian words used today is very small. Hi Mohamad, thanks for the perspective and information. We are in the process of doing some background research and possibly interviewing some experts for Part 2 of this blog, which will be centered around Arabic. Stay tuned.
Does it really matter to know the language with the most words? Sort of to me. I 33 am living in Japan since one year. As a native Japanese, French, German and English speaker I have lived in many countries before, but the sheer endlessness of Japanese words is driving me crazy. Japanese, although I speak it since my childhood my mother being Japanese, is pain to learn there is no doubt about it.
Hi Felix, Thanks for reading and providing your perspective. Yes, our research does indicate Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn. I thought only Tamils and other hindi speakers are the only ones who are obsessed with their language, but here i see many arabic speakers are became hardcore fanatics about their language. The fact is this Hebrew is the oldest and richest language in the world.
Arabic is not oldest but rich language. Tamil and sanskrit both are old languages may be similar to arabic. Stop brainwashed by tamil sanskrit or arabic illusion. I am a Tamil speaker from srilanka but i will never say tamil is oldest language of the world.
Comparatively, all human languages contain tens of thousands of words built upon several variations of […]. Guys, pls stop fitting on this. It is already said that compound languages are the richest, and so in that category is swedish the winner of this long discussion. If we […]. Yes, it matters. Not everyone has to be a winner. As a translator, I can tell you that English is incredibly rich with words that are similar in meaning but each with their own nuance.
A rich vocabulary is important for thinking and creating. Too bad the comments went way out of topic comparing sizes like boys in elementary. So many things to admire in the idea of language and most people end up counting words.. Thanks, Chris. We will be publishing the follow up very shortly. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!
There is nothing about words being counted. The follow-up will be coming this week! I hear here, Arabic or Hebrew has many words because additional words are composed from roots. What about Occitan, were you can have 40 words describing aspects of one concept, for example a meadow? Or Polish, where you can derive tens of words from one words , seven cases, because of declensions, aspects, etc. Quite complex and poetic language also. Also this language allows for creating new words in poetic sense, but those are of course not compound words like in German.
So, it is difficult to say which language has the most vocabulary, as which criteria we apply? And what makes things a little bit more complicated, some native speakers make claims out of ethnic pride, yet how many linguists really researched this subject in depth?
Very often those are claims, that such and such language is the richest, are made by amateur linguists. I have my doubts about it. Hi Elizaveta, Thanks for reading. Also the language is similar to English and it is not at the top.
Thanks, DS Aswai! Sanskrit is indeed a very old language, though not the oldest. The consensus is Tamil takes that title. How about Sumerian? The oldest text known to man is the Epic of Gilgamesh after all. Hebrew is different to Arabic but Hebrew has a similar meaning as it was originated from god but got changed by your people but there is still some of it which is true. Thanks for reading Hadi! We will likely be exploring other languages in this fashion so be on the lookout for that!
Eu podia me admirar e maravilhar pq estudei Latim durante 8 anos. Exemplos: quantum satis qs , ad libem. In the past, the Guinness Book of Records ranked the Greek language as the richest in the world with 5 million words and 70 million word types! Well, many of these words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Take a look, for example at medical, musical, or historical terms and expressions.
Hi, guys I am looking for an Arabic-Hungarian dictionary; does someone know where I can buy such a book? A link would be helpful. Many thanks,. Hi Andres! We actually have since posted an entire blog dedicated to Arabic. Croatian language has Such an interesting topic going by the range of comments that it has provoked. Some languages, like English, use many words borrowed from other languages. Original words show the creativity of a language.
The people who spoke that language invented a name for an idea and represented it through a series of sounds to make up a word. That word is part of a larger system that their language has developed. So the language reflects the nature of people who spoke it. In fact, one of the criterion for defining a classical language is that the words it uses were all developed from within the community and not borrowed from other groups. The basis for many hundred of languages? Greek with all inflections has more than 6.
You all are babbling about Arabic having However, seeing as the Hebrew language- ancient Hebrew to be precise-is older than classical Arabic implies that the latter is an evolved form of the Hebrew language.
This is backed up by the fact that the Nabataeans who were Arabs were nomadic and originally wrote pieces of literature in Aramaic though they then switched to Arabic.
The fact that they were nomads means that they may have been influenced proof that they were influenced exists in the form of Greek-looking sculptures in their temples when they finally decided to settle down.
Proof is also shown in the textiles of the clothing they use as tents when they were still nomads. Older languages such as the ancient Mesopotamian family of languages: Assyrian, Babylonian, Aramaic and the oldest known language: Sumerian, as is proven by a series of ancient Sumerian texts called the Epic of Gilgamesh being the oldest text known to man. These languages may have had more words than the Arabic have today. Not to mention that most of the Ancient Greek papyrus scrolls that have withered away without being read by archeologists may have contained more words than the modern Greek language has.
Incredible arguments! And should words in agglutinative languages include all possible agglutinations, some of which become sentences in translation. So, should all possible sentences in non-agglutinative languages be included?? Added: And although this about richness of a language and not individual speakers, even the best of translators is limited to perhaps fewer than , distinct individual words, not including various cases, tenses, etc.
So, is it total word count that provides richness? Since English is hugely composed of loanwords and has no compunction against borrowing at will, should all languages be included in English? Yes, ridiculous, but it does beg the question of what restricts the richness of any language that will borrow and incorporate as needed or to provide nuance? I think that part of the richness of a language is how many people can actually communicate with it.
Part of the reason that english is an international trade language is that you dont actually have to know as much of it to have conversations with native speakers. I for one live in a college town with a large number of international students as well as a fair number of immigrants.
In nebraska. Luis O, I concur. One thing I would like to know, who counts these millions of words in a particular language? After counting the first one or two million, who certifies that words are not repeated in the next 10 million? By the way, in my humble opinion, the beauty of a language comes from the way the speaker or writer is able to convey, describe or impart information, with the creative use of the senses, passion, emotion, keenness and intensity in such a way as to deeply affect the sensibilities of the reader or listener.
I believe this is achievable in any language. It all depends on the one orchestrating the words. Or so I think. This is the right blog for anybody who wishes to find out about this topic.
You understand so much its almost hard to argue with you not that I actually will need to…HaHa. You certainly put a fresh spin on a subject that has been written about for a long time.
Wonderful stuff, just great! Hi Fatal! Thanks for the kind words. We are glad you enjoyed this! Check out our blog on Arabic, too. Good post. I learn something new and challenging on blogs I stumbleupon every day. We are glad you liked it! Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. March 7, But wait. The simplest problem in comparing the size of different languages is inflection. Does that make Spanish richer in word count?
Moreover, many languages habitually build long words from short ones. Turkish not only crams words together but does so in ways that make whole, meaningful sentences. Counting the Words in the Dictionary Another way of measuring the vocabulary in a language and comparing counts is by counting the number of words listed in a standard authoritative dictionary in that language.
So, which language is richest in words?
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