Why does English have such a large vocabulary?

*NOTE: I tried posting this yesterday, but the block rule for more than 10 posts per IP prohibited it until today*

<<More than half the words in the biggest English dictionaries are unknown by most people, so it's not like most people used them and that's why they were added, it's more like dictionaries are tyring to add as many words as possible just to say that English has the "biggest vocabulary" and since they don't have an academy to stop them they can do whatever they want. >>

I kinda have to disagree here. Dictionaries don't add words for vain glory (who cares if English has the biggest vocabulary?). The reason why English has so many words is due to a time in English literary history where coining and borrowing words from Greek and Latin was rife.

For instance, if writer XYZ wrote book "XYZ123" in 1700 and coined the word floccinaucinihilipilification, it appeared in the next edition of the English dictionary in 1710 (or whatever year it may have been). Even if the word was used only this once and has never been used since, every subsequent edition of the English dictionary has had to contain the word because I might go down to the bookstore tonight and buy a copy of "XYZ123" and read it. If I come across floccinaucinihilipilification, then I may have to look it up.

It's this type of scenario playing out century over century which has led to the accumulation of English words over time--the end result being the huge and rather inordinate size of the English wordbook.

I popped in at this site because i'm studying for the PSATs. Really, I agree that many words just aren't used anymore, and I would go so far as to say they have barely been used. (I could have used sparsely in that sentance!) But, I think that this is what makes English a beautiful language. So many meanings and adjectives lead to great forms of literary art, such as poems and lyrics. That may be a main reason why there are so many english music hits in many countries that do not even have english as a national language. Well, there's my two cents.

English is also a mish-mash of many languages, and is open to adopting words from other languages, and has been at the forefront of technology, culture, economics, and power since the 1700s (and has adopted words coined by the other powers, such as German (SHADENFROODE), French, etc.

Old story. But, English is uniquely rich in its linguistic diversity.

You only have to watch the annual pan European Eurovision Song contest on TV every spring - not that I do as it is just plain (BLEEP) godawful crapito and such a waste of time really, and it's held on a Saturday night for a start, when most sane people are out and about knocking back pints and chasers and doing the clubs and later knocking off copper's caps (or helmets if you're in England) on the way to the takeaway and finally on the way home.

But at least it gives Terry Wogan a further boost to his massive earnings, but even he's so pissed off with it now and the old geezer ain't gonna do it no more......it's very anti UK bias is simply all down to politics. No matter how fantastic, how amazing, how terrific, how "this will deffo make the charts" it is - the UK entry is guaranteed never to score more points than you can count on one hand, if that. It is that politically biased, plus the fact that they feel they have enough English Language songs playing all the clubs and discos across Europe as it is, yet this is the (BLEEPING) astonishing thing - practically every European country taking part (which is virtually all of them, even those not part of the EU, as yet anyway) have their performers singing in........aye, you're ight, guys........ENGLISH. From Macedonia to Norway, from Greece to Finland, from Serbia to Sweden and all the rest of them....it's ENGLISH. Needless to say there is one exception to this "rule"...aye, you've guessed it.....France!

When it comes to the voting which takes (BLEEPING) hours and hours it is all done in....aye, you've got it.....ENGLISH....all the people reporting in from all the European capitals all do it in...ENGLISH, but not when it's the turn of Paris, of course. The two presenters from which ever capital city is hosting the whole thing do it all in .....ENGLISH. Except when it's held in Paris of course.

Le Royaume Uni is more or less the big bad wolf when it comes to this crazy Eurofest crap, le bete noir, the black sheep, the Nasty Man of L'Europe....but everyone taking part uses the very Language that first saw the light of day in Le Royaume Uni (well, the Angleterre bit anyway) in the first place.....well, except for the French of course.

The really strange thing is ths.....it's highly likely that the one song they all dissed - that of Le Royaume Uni terrible - is the song that just mayl be playing in many of those clubs and discos of Continental Europe not long afterwards anyway when practically all of the others will be long forgotton.....except maybe in the clubs and discos of France....just maybe, you never know. The French have tried all manner of means to suppress the scary (to them) rising influence of the English Language in France.

I don't know what "anomaly" mean. I looked up it in Dictionary but not have.

-if I were to read all the words in the biggest English dictionaries, I bet you by far most people wouldn't know what half the words meant. -


This is true of all languages, let's say only 40 % of all lexical units are known to 80 % of speakers.

-it's very anti UK bias is simply all down to politics.-


Not true. Stop sending yucky song/artists, send something like
Gina G - Just a little bit, which was one of the biggest hits of 1996 worldwide, even in the US

A good song is a good song.

Two thoughts on "English has the largest vocabulary."

One: English-language dictionaries tend to keep words listed, even if they are little used, or even no longer used. Dictionary publishers from other languages tend to stick to more current vocabulary.

Two: The big reason that English vocabulary is cited as being so large is usually attributed to the influx of French words that came in after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Thus many Anglo-Saxon words have a French (or Latin) counterpart in English. But this is hardly unique to English! Japanese, for example, usually has a Chinese borrowing for most native Japanese words--and on top of that, it has borrowed a massive number of words from English. Modern Norwegian speakers can often choose words from Bokmål, Nynorsk, and even other dialects. A similar dialect choice often presents itself to speakers of other languages, as people move freely and the media connects diverse regions.

I think the claims for English are overblown.

As I wrote earlier, I count syllables much more... that's a different matter, but the abundance of latinate words/French words, etc, are enough to make the English vocabulary so huge to learn.

Even at university, I don't find a lot of really obscure words (usually latinate, again); rather, it's the derived words that add to the vocabulary at large.

Let me take a few words from sociolinguistics, for example:
-context, contextual, contextualize, contextualization
it's basically all about context, and I translate it in the same ways to my language (my language also has -al, -ize, and -ization, but with regular suffixes). If you count these as four words, then there's no doubt that English could be (while some say "must") having the largest vocabulary.

But should you really treat dog and canine as two words? Judging their origins, yes, and you don't normally write canine unless in academic contexts, for example. I don't think "two" is important in this case. When we have so rarely-used derivations like canine (this is latinate, and only for all the species of dogs) and contextualization (this is in literature, linguistics, etc)... they aren't really important in real terms. You gain such vocab. when you study academic stuff; it's a must, not a may. They shouldn't be too difficult, either, because they aren't "new" words. You know dog before canine and context before contextualize.

Beyond a certain level of competent proficiency (with native speakers), the difficulty of learning vocab is a irrelevant for not having a real word count that you must reach by some dates.

We came close to losing our little guest.

I knew he was in pain from the canine, I just didn't know how awful it was going to be. The procedure took about 4 hours I think. My, was I very careful with him. He had to have 11 extracted, there was not much cleaning possible.

In getting them out, a great deal of bone came with them. His bone was so thin in his lower jaw that his jaw broke when the canines came out. Also, he had such a nerve to expose his canines. Most of the bone in his lower jaw had reabsorbed, or whatever the term is. He stopped on one of his canines midway back, and just cleaned it. That canine if pulled, would have broken his jaw in a second place and would have made rewiring his jaw impossible. There is very little bone there. He said at that point he would have had to make a metal plate for the jaw.

The canine will be fine.

<<-context, contextual, contextualize, contextualization >>

In English, these are treated as 4 words, rather than as the same word with various suffixes applied, as would be the case in Romance languages.

English--though containing a lot of words with these suffixes--still doesn't really treat them as native, as it does, for instance, in the following "words" which would not normally be broken out into separate listings in a dictionary: stand, standing, standingly, standingliness [--*forms used for illustration purposes only].

This points to English having borrowed each of the aforementioned words (context, etc) individually as units, or forming them on analogy with other words so borrowed, rather than having created them from active particles once already in English.

<<This is true of all languages, let's say only 40 % of all lexical units are known to 80 % of speakers. >>

I suspect it's more like 90% of the words in an unabridged dictionary (that includes specialized technical terms) that are unknown to most people.

Besides what defines a word and which things define the number of words, these claims ... are just claims.

I can't even give a rough count about Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, but I guess it shouldn't be more than 100 000 "words" (Ciyu).... but we, too, have infinite language situations to describe. In absolute terms, it may only be true that far less Chinese words are used in the local academia, and most academic literature go untranslated. Then I can say Hong Kong Chinese has far less words than, perhaps, its northern, standard counterpart.

And this is related to a particular issue: for the same word, like contextualization, do you count more words when it has multiple meanings in multiple disciplines?