Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries have shot down the idea that it can be rationale to debate how many words exists within the English language - It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly 1 million words (although most linguists would take that estimate with a chunk of salt, and some have said they wouldnt be surprised if it is off the mark by a quarter-million) - MW There is no single sensible answer to this question. Its impossible to count the number of words in a language, because its 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? - Oxford - but, at least there seems to be a means of calculating how many of these millions you may be familiar with, with respect to when you were born and where live.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 08:20:50 +0000
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