How many words are there in the English language?

英语里到底有多少个单词？

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How many words are there in the English language2:49来自新概念英语的教与学

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 dogone 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?

对于这个问题，几乎没有合理的答案。要想计算清楚一门语言的单词量几乎是不可能的，因为很难界定清楚什么才叫单词。比如说，dogone算是一个还是两个单词？因为dogone作为名词，表示一种动物，而作为动词，则表示紧紧跟随。如果这种情况算作两个单词，那么是不是单词的不同变形也要算作不同的单词？比如，dogs既可以作为名词dog（狗）的复数形式，也可以作为动词dog（跟踪）的第三人称单数形式。dog-tired（精疲力尽的）算是一个单词，还是连在一起的两个单词？hot dog（热狗）真的是两个单词吗？要知道，hot dog也可以写作hot-dog，甚至是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?

如果说某个单词算不算单词或算几个单词很难定义的话，有些单词算不算英语单词也很难定义。比如说医学或科学术语算不算英语单词？法律领域中的拉丁语单词，烹饪领域里的法语单词，学术写作领域里的德语单词，武术里的日语单词，算不算英语单词？苏格兰方言算不算英语？十几岁的孩子说的俚语算不算英语？缩略语算不算英语？

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 aount of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).

总共有20册的《牛津英语词典》第二版中，收录了171,476个在使用的单词和47.156个已废弃的单词。而在此基础上，还有大约9.500个派生词，作为小类目收录进词典里。这些单词中大约一半多是名词，大约四分之一是形容词，大约七分之一是动词，剩下的包括感叹词、连词、介词、后缀等。而这些数字还不包括用来归类不同单词的单词，如noun和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.

这就意味着，英语里至少有25万完全不同的单词，这还不包括单词的变形，也不包括那些词典里未收录的技术性或是地域性的词汇，也不包括那些尚未被收录到已经出版的词典里的单词。而这些单词中，大约有20%当前已经不再使用。如果单词的不同含义也算作不同的单词的话，英语的单词总量将会多达75万。

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