>From OxfordDictionaries.com: **** How many words are there in the English language?
There is no single sensible answer to this question. It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually 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 (e.g. 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 it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog? It's 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? Teenage slang? Abbreviations? The Second Edition of the 20-volume 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 exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don't take account of entries with senses for different word classes (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. **** How many valid LC words (defined terms) are there? Easier to pin down, presumably…. -- Peter Peter M. Brigham pmb...@gmail.com http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig On Dec 28, 2012, at 1:59 PM, Robert Sneidar wrote: > I thought English was somewhere around the order of 38,000, not counting > technicial terms? I wonder how many of the 500,000 words are actually > variations or tenses of another? And then there is this: Published in 1604, > Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall contained roughly 2,500 words, each > matched with a synonym or brief definition. See: The Earliest English > Dictionaries. > > Bob > > > On Dec 28, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Richmond wrote: > >> This reminds me of some "prawn" who told me, when I was working near >> Ashkelon about 32 years ago, that Hebrew was incapable >> of expressing subtle nuances because it had a core vocabulary of only some >> 10,000 words; while English, on the other hand, having >> a lexicon of somewhere around 500,000 words, was far more sophisticated. >> While the figures about the vocab lists are reasonably accurate, >> the other statement is complete tosh. > > > _______________________________________________ > use-livecode mailing list > use-livecode@lists.runrev.com > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription > preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
