My writing will show you that in this world, most people who think they know English actually live in dreamland. This is the scientific discussion that forces you to change your mind while learning English.
PROBLEM NUMBER ONE – WORDS
1 THE GINORMOUS AMOUNT OF WORDS. –
- The biggest problem in English is the humongous amount of words; it circumscribes almost 99% of the English problem.
- Most people believe that English has only one lakh (100,000) words, but you will be shocked to know that the English language actually contains millions of words. In fact, different dictionaries give different counts, ranging from over one million to even two million or more, depending on how words are defined and included.
- Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915) was the main editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). He worked on the dictionary from 1879 until he died.
- He once explained that: If one person tried to type the whole OED (2nd edition),it would take 120 years to type all 5.9 crore (59 million) words.
- It would take the same person 60 more years to check and correct (proofread) those words.
- All the dictionary’s text could be stored on a computer using 540 MB of space.
- Also, by 30 November 2005, the OED had about 3,01,100 main words listed as entries.
What estimates suggest- How many words are in English?
- According to Merriam‑Webster, the English vocabulary is “roughly 1 million words” (though they caution this includes many very rare or technical words). Merriam-Webster
- One language-learning source states: English has “more than a million total words”, about 170,000 words in current use, and an average individual uses – 20,000-30,000 words. EF English Live
- From Wikipedia: The lexicon of English is estimated at around 170,000 words (or ~220,000 if obsolete ones are counted) for common vocabulary; but when you include scientific terminology, archaic words, etc., it could approach 1 million. Wikipedia+2Merriam-Webster+2
- Some sources count about 600,000 word-forms in big dictionaries (including the major edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) and note that many technical/unused words remain uncatalogued. hypertextbook.com+1
Key Studies & Estimates –
- A study by Marc Brysbaert, et al. (2016) in Frontiers in Psychology estimated that an average 20-year-old native American English speaker knows about 42,000 lemmas (base words) + 4,200 multi-word expressions, deriving from 11,100 word-families. PMC+2ResearchGate+2
- They also found gains of about 6,000 new lemmas between ages 20 and 60. ResearchGate+1
- “Lemma” here = a headword in the dictionary sense (not all inflected forms) and “word‐family” = group of related words.
- This gives an estimate of how many words a person knows, not how many exist in English.
- A modelling paper by Eduardo G. Altmann & Martin Gerlach (2012) used a stochastic model of vocabulary growth (based on the Google Books Ngram corpus) and found that natural languages tend to have a huge number of low‐frequency words, i.e., the “noncore” words could be virtually unbounded in practice. arXiv
- They distinguish between “core words” (frequent, fixed number) and the large tail of rare words.
- This supports the idea that the number of words “in English” may be extremely high (or not easily bounded).
- A popular summary source reports that a project (Harvard + Google, around 2010) estimated over 1,022,000 words in English (when counting many forms/rare words) and that the number would keep growing. EF English Live
- But this is a rough estimate, includes many forms, archaic and rare words, and is not strictly “academic peer‐reviewed” for the total count.
- Also refers to “words in the language” in a broad sense.
What these imply
- The “how many words does the average person know?” question: Around 30,000-50,000 lemmas for native, highly educated speakers. (From Brysbaert et al.)
- The “how many words *exist in English (including rare, technical, archaic)?” question: The research suggests there is no fixed small numbe,r potentially well over a million, especially if you include rare/obsolete/infrequent words.
- The modelling study implies the vocabulary has a long “tail” of very rare words, meaning you’ll keep finding new words as you expand the corpus or include more specialised domains.
My Summary in Simple Terms
- How many words does a typical native speaker know? Answer: – 40,000 (give or take) major words.
- How many words are in English overall (including obscure, technical, and old words)? Answer: Over a million, maybe much more, and there is no exact limit given current research.
- It depends heavily on how you define “word” (lemma vs. inflected form vs. compound), how large/varied your data set is, and whether you include rare/obsolete words
2 NOUN ANOMALY
Example:1
- I like Nispero. – (I is an English word; like is an English verb; Nisparo is a Spanish word/noun).
- I like chicozapote. – (I is an English word; like is an English verb; chicozapote is a Spanish word/noun).
- I like soapapple. (I is an English word; like is an English verb; soapapple is a Spanish word/noun).
- Here, you should assume that you are a great expert in grammar and you know almost all the basic English words like I, he, go, do, have, etc., but even in this situation, you are not able to understand the above sentence because you don’t know about the nouns that English has borrowed from other languages. (The “how many words does the average person know?” Around 30,000-50,000 lemmas for native, highly educated speakers. (From Brysbaert et al.)
- chicozapote, nispero, or soapapple, commonly known as chicoo, chicle, sapodilla, or sapote
Example:2
- I like Mango (I is an English word; like is an English verb; Mango is an Indian word/noun).
- I like Banana (I = English; like = English verb; Banana is from Portuguese.)
- I like Rambutan (I = English word; like = English verb; Rambutan is from Malay.)
- But here you understand all the sentences because you understand the nouns of other languages borrowed in English.
3 VERBS – NOUN ANOMALY
- Verbs are the most important part of any language; they decide the nature of the language. In English, there are almost 1000 verbs (main and helping verbs) that determine whether the sentence is in English or another language.
- English has about 860,000 verbs, yet we only employ a small portion of them in daily speech. Numerous factors, including our education, occupation, and hobbies, influence how many verbs we use. But it’s thought that humans regularly utilise between 10,000 and 20,000 verbs.
- The problem here is not the verbs that exist in English, as there are only thousands of words, but the real issue is the noun or verb that is borrowed from another language. The number of nouns in English borrowed from foreign languages is in the millions.
- The number of nouns borrowed from other languages is 59 million. Millions of nouns cannot be changed into active verbs/adjectives
NOW HERE IT IS CLEAR THAT BY KNOWING NOUNS YOU CAN LEARN ENGLISH EASILY. YOU NOT ONLY LEARN ENGLISH BUT ALSO UNDERSTAND IT EASILY BECAUSE YOUR UNDERSTANDING MORE OR LESS DEPENDS ON NOUNS.
OUR MAIN AIM IN LEARNING ENGLISH IS TO UNDERSTAND ENGLISH; EVEN IF YOU KNOW ALL THE BASIC OR COMMON WORDS OF ENGLISH, OR YOU ARE GOOD AT GRAMMAR, YOU ARE STILL NOT ABLE TO UNDERSTAND SIMPLE ENGLISH SENTENCES.
SO HERE YOU SHOULD UNDERSTAND THAT IF SOMEONE IS SAYING THAT BY LEARNING A FEW THOUSAND WORDS OF ENGLISH YOU CAN EASILY SPEAK, WRITE, AND UNDERSTAND ENGLISH, THEN YOU SHOULD CHECK YOUR MIND AGAIN. THAT PERSON IS FOOLING YOU IN BROAD DAYLIGHT.
IF SOME NOUNS ARE MISSING IN THE VOCABULARY OF A LANGUAGE, THEY CREATE THEM ACCORDING TO THEIR LOCAL ORTHOGRAPHIC, VOCABULARY, AND GRAMMAR RULES. ONLY IN RARE CASES DO THEY BORROW FROM OTHER LANGUAGES.
BUT THE QUALITY OF ENGLISH IS VERY GOOD; IT DOES NOT ITSELF FORM A NOUN; RATHER, IT BORROWS FROM OTHER LANGUAGES. ONLY IN RARE CASES DO THEY FORM NOUNS. SO THE HORIZONS OF ENGLISH BECOME WHACKING GREAT.
