How many words are in the English language?

There are more than 500,000 words in the English language by the count of its largest dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, and more than 476,000 in Webster's Third, the largest American one. Neither is the number of words in English, because no such number exists: every dictionary decides what to leave out, and English adds new words faster than any dictionary records them. What can be measured is how many words people actually use, and that number is far smaller. In film and television dialogue, the 1,000 most common English words make up 82.5% of everything said.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 5 min read

What the dictionaries count

The Oxford English Dictionary describes itself as a guide to "over 500,000 words and phrases", and counted 520,779 entries in January 2026, with 888,251 meanings between them. Its last printed edition, in 1989, had 291,500 entries in twenty volumes; the dictionary has grown by nearly 230,000 entries since that edition. Webster's Third, published by Merriam-Webster in 1961, had more than 476,000 vocabulary entries by 2005.

Why the dictionaries disagree

They are counting different things. An "entry" is a headword with all its senses. Set is one entry with hundreds of meanings; the OED's entry for the verb set in its second edition ran to about 60,000 words. Run, ran and running are one entry, not three. A dictionary that gave each meaning its own entry would double its count overnight.

They decide differently what is English. The OED is a historical dictionary: it keeps words that went out of use centuries ago, with the date of their last known use, so its count includes a good deal of English that nobody speaks. A dictionary of current English leaves those out. Every dictionary also draws its own line for technical terms, regional words, slang, names, and compounds such as ice cream and ice-cream.

English keeps borrowing. About 28% of modern English words come from French and another 28% from Latin, according to the sources Wikipedia cites, and the borrowing never stopped: the OED's recent additions include café culture, cafecito and Café Brûlot. A word in use somewhere in the English-speaking world may be years from any dictionary.

How many words are actually used

The dictionaries answer the question "how many words could you look up?" A different question is how many words people use, and that one can be measured.

We counted every word in 735 million words of English film and television subtitles, the largest record of everyday dialogue there is. Here is how many different word forms it takes to make up a given share of everything said:

Sixty-odd words make up half of all English speech. You, I, the, to, a and their neighbours do most of the work, and the list of them is in the 1,000 most common English words.

The long tail is enormous. The same subtitles contain 1,656,996 different word forms, and 54.0% of them appear exactly once. Many of those are names, typing errors and made-up words, but many are real words that are simply rare. That tail is where the dictionary's half million lives.

These are word forms, so run, runs and running are three; counted as dictionary words, every figure above would be smaller.

How many words does one person know?

Somewhere between the 60 words of half of speech and the half million of the dictionary sits the vocabulary of one person. The best-known careful estimate, Brysbaert and colleagues' 2016 study, puts the average 20-year-old native speaker of American English at 42,000 dictionary words, with a range of 27,000 to 52,000: see how many words the average person knows. And on an ordinary day, a person says somewhere around 16,000 words, using only a few thousand different ones: see how many words people say a day.

So English has more than half a million words in its largest dictionary, a typical adult knows fewer than a tenth of them, and a day's conversation uses a fraction of that again.

Is English the language with the most words?

It is often said to be, usually on the strength of the OED's size. The claim does not survive a closer look, because other languages' dictionaries are built on different rules and because some languages make new words in a way that no dictionary could list. The comparison, with measured figures for seven languages, is in which language has the most words. The same question for other languages: French, Spanish and Chinese.

If you are learning another language

The same curve holds in every language, and it is good news for learners: a few thousand words cover most of what is said. Verbavia (our own course) teaches Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese to English speakers in exactly that order, the most common words first, free on the web. How many words each needs is set out in how many words you need to speak a language.

Sources

• Oxford English Dictionary: oed.com, "over 500,000 words and phrases", read 15 October 2026.
• Wikipedia: Oxford English Dictionary (520,779 entries and 888,251 meanings as of January 2026; 291,500 entries in the 1989 print edition; the 60,000-word entry for set).
• Wikipedia: Webster's Third New International Dictionary (more than 476,000 vocabulary entries as of 2005).
• Wikipedia: English language (about 28% of modern English words from French and 28% from Latin).
• Brysbaert, M., Stevens, M., Mandera, P. & Keuleers, E. (2016). How Many Words Do We Know? Frontiers in Psychology 7:1116. frontiersin.org
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_words_count.py in Verbavia's repository and printed from its output rather than typed.