The exact number of words each language of the world has is not verified. Some people say that English has the largest number of words while others say that the number of words in some Semitic languages, including Arabic, exceeds millions.
English Language, According to the Oxford Dictionary and its contents, the English language is the largest in the number of words it possesses and due to its adoption as a universal language in all areas of knowledge and science.
English Language, According to the Oxford Dictionary and its contents, the English language is the largest in the number of words it possesses and due to its adoption as a universal language in all areas of knowledge and science.
Which language in the world that has the most number of words?
Perhaps we can do a word count of vocabulary in each language's e-dictionary (easier to count)? Perhaps we should also exclude vocabulary that can be modified / combined / acronymized to create another new vocabulary.
The Oxford Dictionary says it's quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages. The reason is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German. English shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages.
By far Greek language because you can synthesize mathematically millions of words. Besides, it is considered the language of science including medicine. Even now most scientific terms in medicine, astronomy, science in general (as well as literature) emanate from Greek
Arabic has a very rich morphology where roots of words can be formed to derive a lot of words. The word ( love) for example, can have tens of different forms that vary in shades of meanings. The word camel also has so many forms with different forms. The word sword has many different forms that undergoes many meanings. Some linguists of Arabic believe that the number of Arabic words in the dictionary exceeds 12 millions. Of this is true, then Arabic becomes on the top of the list in languages that have the biggest number of words.
English is among the largest languages by word count. It has more than 200,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, including 171,476 words in use and 47,156 obsolete words. This is largely due to invasions of England by the Vikings and then the Normans, as well as colonization and waves of exploration that supplemented the English vocabulary with multitudes of foreign words.
I have made some research about this question. The most accurate answer i found is stated by Oxford Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary reported that, English language has the most number of words due to it is historical. But, I am not completely satisfied I need to do more research about that.
Hello, having part of my studies around languages and being a speaker of 5 languages in a professional level, I would say first of all languages are influenced by each other, as an example there are words used in many different languages such as “taperamento” or “o.k.“ given that, if we consider all these words then possibly the language with most words becomes the English Language, but it’s important to outline that almost 70% of the words if we count it this way, come from other languages. An example of that is that in English we have more than 40.000 Greek words, from Sciences to History to music to politics and many arts. As well as English has a great influence from Latin, latin languages and early Italian, fact which contributes at least in the 20% of modern English, since English is considered to be a Germanic language. In general the more rules and grammar a language has even if it sounds controversial the more flexibility it gives you to create words, thus to shape the language further. Additionally in English language there is Spanish influence, Indian influence of course and Arabic. But if we consider the words which have a systemic essence in a language, thus the words created through a linguistic background that makes sense before the synthesis or the construction of the word English is not the language with the most words. The words do have to represent a logical cohesion in the rules of the language in order to be a word of a language. For these reasons languages of ancient origins such as Greek and Chinese through the process of their evolution to the modern day use of language have an uncountable number of words which if analyzed linguistically do represent an autonomous meaning in the language. Thus the more ancient a language is and it is still alive the more words it has. Those are my beliefs after a couple of years of extensive studies of languages without stating I am absolutely right. Hope it helps and contributes in the interesting conversation!