How many words are there in the French language?

It depends on which dictionary you open, and French has an unusual number of serious ones. The Académie française's own dictionary, finished in 2024, lists nearly 53,000 words. Le Petit Robert has more than 60,000 and Le Petit Larousse 64,150. The Trésor de la langue française, the largest scholarly dictionary of modern French, has 100,000. And the Dictionnaire des francophones, which gathers the French of 52 countries, holds about 500,000 words and expressions. None of these is wrong; they set out to count different things. This page is about how big French is. How many words a learner needs, which is a much smaller number, is in how many words you need to speak French.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 9 min read

Five dictionaries, five answers

Look at the senses column and the problem is plain. Le Petit Robert finds 300,000 senses in about 60,000 words; Le Petit Larousse finds 125,000 in a few thousand more. The two are not describing different languages. They divide the same words into meanings differently, and that choice alone moves the count by a factor of two.

The Académie's dictionary: ten editions in 330 years

The Académie française published its first dictionary in 1694. The second came in 1718 and the eighth in 1932–35. The ninth was begun in 1986 and came out in parts: the first volume (A to Enzyme) in 1992, the second in 2000, the third in 2011 and the fourth in 2024. The Académie declared it finished in November 2024, 38 years after it started.

It holds nearly 53,000 words, about 21,000 more than the eighth edition. That is a smaller count than the yearly dictionaries give. The Académie describes the work as aiming at coherence, timelessness and continuity between its editions, while giving current events a place. Work on a tenth edition began in 2025, and its first entries went online in June 2026.

Two other numbers from the Académie's online dictionary show how much depends on the unit:

• About 5,200 words have disappeared. The online version merges all the editions since 1694, so you can look up words that were in an older edition and have since been dropped. There are about 5,200 of them. A dictionary's count goes down as well as up.
• 7,000 verbs make 425,000 forms. The dictionary's conjugation tool can conjugate any of its 7,000 verbs in every mood and tense, and it runs on a database of more than 425,000 inflected forms. Count French words as dictionary headwords and the verbs are 7,000 of them; count them as spellings a reader meets and they are hundreds of thousands. Which of them matter most is in the most common French verbs.

Why the commercial dictionaries are bigger, and keep growing

Le Petit Robert and Le Petit Larousse are revised every year. Since the early 2000s Le Petit Robert has been updated each May with 150 to 200 new words, expressions and senses, and Larousse publishes a list of its new entries every year.

So a yearly dictionary's count is a snapshot of one year's edition, while the Académie's is the result of a 38-year job, and its 5,200 dropped words show that the count can fall as well as rise.

The biggest dictionary describes French up to 1960

The largest number on the list from a single editorial team, the Trésor de la langue française's 100,000 words, comes with a date attached. Its subtitle is Dictionnaire de la langue du 19e et du 20e siècle (1789–1960). Work on it began in 1960, the first of its sixteen volumes appeared in 1971 and the last in 1994, and its makers say plainly that it does not describe the language of today. A supplement written between 1992 and 1997 added about 10,000 entries for words established since 1965, but the editing has ended and most of its contributors have left the laboratory.

The Trésor is now online as the TLFi. It is the best answer to "how many words has French had in the last two centuries", which is a bigger question than "how many words does French have now".

French outside France

French dictionaries made in France mark words that belong somewhere else, and Larousse's online dictionary has many of them:

Each of those is one more entry in a dictionary made in France. The Dictionnaire des francophones starts from the other side. Commissioned by the French government and run by the University of Lyon 3 with the government's delegation for the French language, it merges sources from across the French-speaking world, including the French Wiktionary, inventories of the French of Belgium and of Africa, Quebec's Grand dictionnaire terminologique, the French government's list of official terms and dictionaries of the regional French of France. That is how it reaches about 500,000 words and expressions from 52 countries: it treats the French of all those countries as one language.

The Académie points in the same direction from the other end. Its online dictionary now has more than 860 links to the Dictionnaire des régionalismes de France, and nearly 15,000 to FranceTerme, the government's database of nearly 10,000 officially recommended terms for technical subjects.

What a counter calls a word

Dictionaries choose headwords. A program counting words in text has to decide what a word is from the spelling alone, and French spelling makes that hard. In 318 million words of French film and television subtitles, the commonest entries include c' (11th, as in c'est), l' (16th) and j' (19th): pieces of words, cut off at the apostrophe. Hyphens go the other way, gluing words together. The list counts est-ce (as in est-ce que) as one word, and avez-vous ("have you") and excusez-moi ("excuse me") as one word each; by our count, 165,174 of its different entries contain a hyphen.

Even one idea can be four entries. The subtitles use e-mail about 9.6 times per million words and mail about as often; courriel, the word Larousse defines, comes up 1.2 times per million; and mél, the abbreviation that Larousse says the French administration recommends in front of an email address, 0.2 times. Four words, one thing.

How much French is actually used?

Those subtitles contain 834,768 different spellings, more than any dictionary on this page, the Dictionnaire des francophones included, and much of it noise. By our count of the same list:

Nearly half are said exactly once, the misspellings and one-off names of a corpus this size. Spellings said at least a hundred times number about 50,000, close to the Académie's 53,000 words, but that is a coincidence of size rather than a match: the subtitle count includes every verb form, every avez-vous and every c', and leaves out most of the dictionary's literary and technical vocabulary. Even within this corpus, Belgian and Swiss French barely register: septante turns up 11 times in more than three hundred million words, against 249 for soixante-dix.

So, how many words does French have?

• By the Académie française: nearly 53,000, in an edition that took from 1986 to 2024.
• By the yearly dictionaries: more than 60,000 in Le Petit Robert, 64,150 in Le Petit Larousse, a figure that changes every year.
• Across two centuries: 100,000 in the Trésor de la langue française, which stops at 1960.
• Across the French-speaking world: about 500,000 words and expressions in the Dictionnaire des francophones.
• In film and television dialogue: 834,768 different spellings, of which about 50,000 are said at least a hundred times.

Spanish answers the same question very differently, with one dictionary written jointly by the Spanish language academies of Spain, the Americas and beyond: see how many words are there in Spanish. How many words one person knows, rather than one language holds, is in how many words the average person knows.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches French in frequency order, starting from the words that fill everyday speech rather than from a dictionary. The French course is free on the web in any browser, including on a phone, with grammar explained in English and hand-written lessons. The 1,000 most common French words are free to browse, and the two-minute French vocabulary test estimates how many of them you know. Whether all this makes French hard is in is French hard to learn.

To sample the part of that vocabulary a learner needs, the random French word generator draws words by frequency level.

Which language has the most words, and why the question has no single answer, is in which language has the most words.

Sources

• Académie française, La 9e édition: publication in parts from 1986, the four volumes of 1992, 2000, 2011 and 2024, nearly 53,000 words and about 21,000 more than the eighth edition, and the aim of coherence and continuity since 1694. academie-francaise.fr
• Académie française, Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, presentation of the online edition: the list of ten editions, the ninth finished in November 2024, the tenth begun in 2025 with first publications in June 2026, the 5,200 "disappeared" words, the 7,000 verbs and 425,000 inflected forms, and the links to the Dictionnaire des régionalismes de France and to FranceTerme's nearly 10,000 terms. dictionnaire-academie.fr
• Wikipedia (French): Le Petit Robert — first edition 1967; more than 60,000 words, 300,000 senses; updated each May with 150 to 200 new words, expressions and senses.
• Wikipedia (French): Le Petit Larousse — first published 1905; 64,150 words, 125,000 senses, 20,000 phrases and more than 28,000 proper names; a yearly list of new entries.
• ATILF, TLFi — Trésor de la langue française informatisé: 100,000 words, 270,000 definitions, 430,000 examples; French of 1789 to 1960; volumes from 1971 to 1994; the supplement of about 10,000 entries (1992–1997). atilf.fr
• Wikipedia (French): Dictionnaire des francophones — about 500,000 words and expressions from 52 countries and 112 places; who runs it and the sources it merges.
• Larousse, Dictionnaire de français: septante, nonante, huitante, dîner, chicon, pistolet, chocolatine, courriel.
• 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 corpus size and spelling count are computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py and printed from its output rather than typed; the ranks, per-million figures and counts by number of uses are our own count of the same fr list.