How many words are there in the Spanish language?

The official dictionary of Spanish, the Real Academia Española's Diccionario de la lengua española, has 93,111 entries and 195,439 senses in its latest printed edition (2014). That is the number most people mean. It is not the whole language: the academies keep a second dictionary of about 70,000 words and expressions used in Spanish-speaking America, and the main dictionary deliberately leaves out words that every speaker makes up on the spot, such as cafecito, "a little coffee". This page is about the size of the language itself. How many of those words a learner needs is a different question with a much smaller answer, covered in how many words you need to speak Spanish.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 9 min read

The official count: 93,111 entries

The Real Academia Española was founded in 1713, and its first job was a dictionary. The Diccionario de autoridades came out in six volumes between 1726 and 1739. In 1780 the Academy cut it down to one volume without the literary quotations, and that one-volume dictionary is the ancestor of today's: it has had 23 editions, the most recent in October 2014.

The Academy's press dossier for that edition gives the figures:

The printed book is not the end of it. Since 2001 the dictionary has been free online, and since 2017 the online version has been updated in numbered releases (23.1, 23.2 and so on) that add words and change definitions ahead of the next printed edition. The Academy reports that it has reached 100 million look-ups in a single month.

What the Academy counts as one word

An entry in the dictionary is not the same thing as a word in a sentence, and the 2014 edition's own introduction shows how the Academy draws the lines.

• Masculine and feminine share an entry. Perro (dog) and perra (female dog) were separate entries in 2001. In 2014 they became one article, perro, rra. A feminine form mostly keeps an entry of its own only when it has a meaning of its own.
• Spelling variants hang off the main form. Substancia points you to sustancia, where it is listed as an alternative ("Tb. substancia"). Two spellings, one entry.
• Set phrases live inside other words. Medio ambiente is defined inside the entry for medio, not as a headword of its own.
• Not every possible word is listed. The dictionary's notes say that words made with productive endings and prefixes, such as adverbs in -mente or words with anti- and des-, go in only once they are used often enough, and that "the absence of a possible derivative or compound does not mean it is illegitimate". Rápidamente (quickly) and tranquilamente (calmly) have entries; inteligentemente (intelligently), educadamente (politely) and románticamente (romantically) do not, although our subtitle corpus has each of them said hundreds of times.
• Diminutives are left out unless they have changed meaning. Spanish adds -ito, -illo and similar endings to almost anything, and the dictionary only lists the ones that mean something new. Look up perrito, "little dog", and the only thing defined is perrito caliente, a hot dog. Look up cafecito and the dictionary says the word "is not in the dictionary".

So 93,111 is a count of entries chosen by an editorial policy, not a count of every word Spanish speakers can say and understand. Anyone who knows café and the ending -ito can work out cafecito, which is why the Academy does not need to list it.

One dictionary for twenty-odd countries

Spanish has no single home country, and the dictionary is written that way. Since 1992 it has been produced with the academies of the other Spanish-speaking countries, and the 2014 edition is credited to all 22 academies of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE). Its stated aim is to record the general vocabulary used in Spain and Spanish-speaking America, with words specific to one country marked as such.

The figures in the table above show how that works out: 18,712 senses carry a mark for an American country, and only 435 a mark for Spain. A sense with no mark is treated as general Spanish, and usages limited to Spain are an exception the dictionary flags like any other.

Everyday objects show it best. Here is what the online dictionary says about some ordinary things, and how often each word turns up in 423 million words of Spanish film and television subtitles:

The bus is the extreme case. Autobús has no mark; guagua is the bus in the Canary Islands, the Antilles, Guatemala and Equatorial Guinea; camión, a lorry in general Spanish, is a bus in Mexico; and colectivo is a bus in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru. That is one thing and four words, all in the same dictionary, each its own entry: regional variety adds far more to the dictionary's total than to any one speaker's vocabulary.

Two cautions about the last column. Subtitle counts are counts of spellings, so móvil also includes the adjective "mobile" and carro also includes carts. And the corpus does not say which country each film was subtitled in, so it shows only that both words in each pair are in real use, not who uses which.

The 70,000 words the main dictionary leaves to another book

Words used in only one or two countries have a book of their own. The Diccionario de americanismos, published by the academies in 2010, sets out to record "all the words proper to the Spanish of America" and contains 70,000 words, compound forms, phrases and idioms, with 120,000 senses in total.

The two books are linked by a rule. When the 2014 edition of the main dictionary was revised, it took in new Americanisms only if the Diccionario de americanismos recorded them as used in at least three countries and they carried no restriction on use. So the main dictionary's 93,111 entries are the part of Spanish shared widely enough to be called general, and the second dictionary holds much of what is local. Adding the two figures would count many words twice, since a widely shared Americanism can be in both.

How many Spanish words are actually used?

A dictionary is a list of what editors chose. A corpus is a count of what people said. The subtitle corpus behind the table above, the same one used across our frequency comparisons, holds 423 million words of running Spanish, and they are made of 1,202,519 different spellings.

That number is far bigger than any dictionary, and it is not a better answer. It counts every conjugated form separately (the way verb endings multiply the count is measured in how many words you need to speak Spanish), and it includes names, typing errors and sounds. By our count of the same list:

Nearly half of all the different spellings turn up exactly once in four hundred million words. Those are the mistypes, the one-off names and the made-up words of a single scene. Raise the bar to a hundred uses and the list shrinks to about 70,000, which is fewer than the dictionary's entries even though every verb form still counts separately. The dictionary is larger than everyday speech in one way, with its technical, regional and old-fashioned words, and the corpus is larger in another, with its forms and its noise.

So, how many words does Spanish have?

• If you mean the official dictionary: 93,111 entries and 195,439 senses in the 2014 edition, with online updates since.
• If you mean the words of all Spanish-speaking countries: add a good part of the Diccionario de americanismos's 70,000, many of them local to one or two countries.
• If you mean everything a speaker can say: there is no ceiling, because Spanish makes new words with endings like -ito and -mente as it goes, and the dictionary itself says a missing word is not a wrong one.
• If you mean what people actually say: 1,202,519 different spellings in our subtitle corpus, of which around 70,000 are said at least a hundred times.

For comparison, Chinese runs from 8,105 standard characters to a 370,000-entry word dictionary, set out in how many words are in Chinese; French has an academy dictionary of its own that took 38 years to finish, in how many words are there in French. And the size of the language says little about the size of one person's vocabulary, which is the subject of how many words the average person knows.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches Spanish from a frequency list, so the words that fill everyday speech come first and the regional and rare ones come late. The Spanish 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 Spanish words are free to browse, and the two-minute Spanish vocabulary test estimates how many you already know. The verbs that make up so many of those forms are ranked in the most common Spanish verbs.

Slang varies by country too: tío, che, vaina and chido are placed on the map and counted in regional Spanish slang.

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

Sources

• Real Academia Española, Dossier de prensa: Diccionario de la lengua española, vigesimotercera edición (2014): 93,111 entries against 88,431 in 2001, 195,439 senses, the counts of country-marked senses, 2,376 pages, and the aim of recording the general vocabulary of Spain and Spanish-speaking America. rae.es
• Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española (presentation page): the Diccionario de autoridades (1726–1739), the one-volume dictionary of 1780, the list of editions, the free online version since 2001, and the 100 million monthly look-ups. rae.es
• Real Academia Española, La vigesimotercera edición (the 2014 edition's introduction): masculine and feminine merged into one article (perro, rra), variants listed inside the main entry, and the geographical marks. rae.es
• Real Academia Española, Advertencias (the 2014 edition's notes for users): derived words such as adverbs in -mente included only once established in use; non-lexicalised diminutives not included. rae.es
• Diccionario de la lengua española, online edition, entries consulted: perrito, cafecito, rápidamente, tranquilamente, inteligentemente, educadamente, románticamente, computadora, ordenador, celular, móvil, coche, carro, aguacate, palta, fresa, frutilla, pajita, popote, autobús, guagua, camión, colectivo.
• Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario de americanismos (2010): 70,000 words, compound forms, phrases and idioms, with 120,000 senses. rae.es
• Wikipedia (Spanish): Diccionario de la lengua española — the numbered online updates from 23.1 (2017) onwards.
• Wikipedia: Diccionario de la lengua española — the collaboration with the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language since 1992.
• 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 per-million figures and the counts by number of uses are our own count of the same es list.