Matt in San Antonio, Texas, poses this question: Which language has the most words? For that matter, how would you even begin to count them? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Which Language Has the Most Words?”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, how are y’all doing? This is Matt Johnson. I’m from San Antonio, Texas.
Hi, Matt. Welcome to the show.
Well, my girlfriend and I were driving down the road listening to the show one day, and she kind of posited the question about which language has the most words in it. And so we kind of thought on it and talked back and forth a little bit. And then I kind of thought, well, would you count every word or just the main root words or all of their conjugated versions. And we thought, you know, this is a good question for Grant and Martha. So we thought we’d go ahead and posit it to y’all.
That’s a huge question.
It’s enormous.
It’s enormous.
You could write books on this. Whole monographs have been written. They’ve taken people months or even years to compose about what constitutes a word. The layperson’s definition isn’t anything like the professional’s definition of what a word is. And really the only reason that you really need to know how many words there are in any given language, the only good reason is if, say, aliens said that they were going to disintegrate the earth if you didn’t tell them. Because really it’s too involved to actually ever come up with this answer.
There is some joker out there who purports to know exactly how many words there are in English, but he can’t be believed and I won’t even mention him. The thing is we have to agree what a word is, right? Some people say, oh, well, you know, it’s a string of characters with spaces on either side. But the thing is, what about hyphenated words? Do they count? What about compounds that behave like single lexical items? Like ice cream is pluralized and treated in all the other ways that a closed compound where there’s no space is treated. So maybe that’s actually a word, right? And what about words like abbreviations like doctor, dr, period? Do we count that as a word or only the longer form?
So yeah. So your second point was really good. Do we count inflected forms, conjugations, pluralizations? If you just even look at the word book, you know, we have dozens of different variants depending on the ending, right? And then what about multiple meanings? So I have book verb and book noun. Do I count them as separate words or the same? And then book noun has something like 14 different meanings. And book verb has something like seven. So, yeah, so there’s no really good way to come up with this answer. And really, it’s just an exercise in futility. I mean, if you’re immortal, if you’re going to live forever, this is a task for you.
Well, it’s good to hear that because we looked it up on Google and found an economist article that she kind of briefly read through. And the main point of it was, why do you even care?
That’s a good point.
Well, what I often tell people when people ask about the number of words in English, just out of curiosity, I say, look, there are possibly as many as 15 million different chemical formulas alone. Chemical names, like the stuff you see on the back of your shampoo bottle, 15 million different ways to put those prefixes and roots and suffixes together to come up with all these actual real chemicals. And we don’t count those. So you’re talking millions just to start, right? And then if you say, well, only the common ones, well, why not the archaic ones? What about the stuff that’s in Shakespeare that nobody uses anymore? Why wouldn’t we count that? You know, if I’m ever bored one day sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I’ll kind of ponder on it a little bit more.
Yeah, if immortality comes your way, you have a great task to undertake. And please share.
Thanks, Matt. Take care now.
Thank you all. Take care.
Bye-bye.
