Many concepts are expressed as phrases, but are most likely represented

as single symbols in the brain. For example "to open the window".

Or "transmission electron microscope". It's one concept, and should

therefore be counted as one word. In German

Transmissionselektronenmikroskop.

Regards,

Joachim

Indeed the complexity/ richness of a language is not necessarily related to the number of distinct words it contains. In a number of polysynthetic languages (Caucasus, Himalaya, New Guinea, etc), the sophisticated addition of countless prefixes and suffixes does allow the locutor to express in just one word what would require a full sentence in French, English, German, etc.

I checked one extreme example related by Georges Dumezil (1930): in the caucasian oubykh language one word sufficed to say: "If only you had not forced him to take once more what I had prepared for them". One long word, integrating multiple social relations, could express that.

I used the past tense because this language from the north-west Caucasus died exactly twenty years ago in October 1992 when its last elderly locutor passed away.

I would rather like to know how many English words can be considered "English" ?Recently, one of my students asked about the prefixes (-im-ir-dis) so on. I had to go down to the root of the each word to figure , when and how we use these prefixes to construct negative adjectives.

I was wondering how many words in English 'really' have English (Anglophone) roots (including the 'split'ones? I haven't studied linguistics, however, I am teaching English and doing my Masters in TESL in Canada.and started to deal with applied linguistics.

I speak Turkish, German (both native level) English and French. I am aware of the above mentioned complexity of English, which makes it very difficult to teach, especially regarding "spelling" The more I teach (and learn) English the more I appreciate German, and all the other 'phonetic and more 'solid'' languages.

Thank you Chris,

I definitely didn't mean to strip English off the outlandish originated words. I was just curious when I saw the question above. In fact, I am dealing with my term paper and browsing all the work related to English as Lingua Franca., and the problems related to de-culturisation of English.

When it comes to "linguistic Nazism", I might be one of the last people defending it, with my mother tongue, being an Altaic language still using Arabic and Persian a lot. I am well aware of the cultural and "linguistic osmosis" happening in the world.

Still some languages seem to be at least "sound" to be less affected by it. (Or maybe I want to think that way) English in Canada, like in many countries in post colonial times, is even more subject to vernacularisation and modifications. I am afraid pretty soon, the Anglophones won't be able to recognise their mother tongue.

I am allowing myself to add one more: "Howmanieth?" It was a real problem for me not to have the 'order question' in English. Honestly how can we ask the question so that the answer is XX th. ? "Which" would not do it, I guess The answer should be a "th " number. For example, if Obama is the 44th president. How can I formulate the question ? I want to say " Howmanieth President is Obama in the US? Also in German there is homesick ( Heimweh) but also (Fernweh) crave for travel. I want to add "Farsick " too. \If a language takes so many influences and vernacularisation is seen as "normal" I would like to contribute too.

@PLordan - You mention astronomy ... Billions (??) you said. Zillions would have said Carl Sagan. Please recheck your numbers - a simple click on Google will do.

Madame, Messieurs,

I quite like your comments, but with a few exceptions they do not answer my question in which I refrained from making any value judgement about richness, complexity and stuff. I know that German likes compounds more than English and that all languages have a history. All I'd like to know is how big the English corpus might be. On the basis of your readings, what would you say?

:-)

I am afraid the Corpus is expanding any minute we are discussing here.That was the reason of my rather humorous commentary with inventing and adding new terms. It might be very difficult to keep track of a language, with all the creativity, newly adopted/invented terms, idioms and above mentioned ambiguity of how to count terms phrases etc. But here is some recent research if it helps. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ and http://www.cambridge.org/de/elt/catalogue/subject/custom/item3646595/Cambridge-International-Corpus-Cambridge-and-Nottingham-Corpus-of-Discourse-in-English-(CANCODE)/?site_locale=de_DE

Interesting question if you use the broadest possible definition of what a "word" is. I remember reading somewhere quite some time ago, a lot of hedging as I am not sure where or when I read this, but I think it was about 1,000,000 words in normal use and another 2,000,000 scientific words and proper nouns. This of course increases every year with additional slang and scientific words being coined. It would be interesting to find out how many words have multiple meanings or uses and which word has the most meanings or uses. All of this should be considered trivia and not true science but I still find it interesting.

There is no final answer to this question. We can, however, find out how many words have been recorded. The OED website homepage has a subtitle More than 600,000 words, over a thousand years. But at the same time, they do not claim that they have recorded each and every word in the English language. Moreover, there are always more and more words entering the English language. See the list of new words added to the OED in March 2015: http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/march-2015-update/new-words-list-march-2015/#new_words.

As far as definition of words is concerned, the opinion may vary whether cat and cats are/is two words or one word. Lexicographers use the term lemma instead, and modern grammarians use lexeme. It would make it a lot easier when we are counting words.

So far as the matter of scope of a corpus is concerned, it is impossible to record all the data of a language, including English. A kid's homework may not be part of a corpus, but it definitely is part of language.