Which language has the most words?

Which language has the most words? English is the answer usually given, on the strength of the Oxford English Dictionary's half million entries, but no language can honestly be named. The number of words in a language depends on what you count as a word, and the languages that build long words out of short ones make the question meaningless: German can make a new word every time it needs one. What can be compared is how many different words people actually use, and when seven languages are measured on the same amount of film and television dialogue, German comes out on top and English comes fifth.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 5 min read

The dictionaries

The largest dictionaries of five languages, as reported on this site:

The details, and why each figure is what it is, are on the pages for English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

On those figures English wins by a wide margin. The table compares dictionaries, though, not languages. The OED is a historical dictionary that keeps words dead for centuries; the Spanish academy's dictionary is a dictionary of current use with a deliberately narrow door. A bigger dictionary is evidence of a bigger dictionary.

Why "how many words" has no answer

What is a word? Run, runs, ran and running: one word or four? Dictionaries say one; a word count says four. Spanish verbs have around fifty forms each, so the choice changes the answer by a factor of ten.

Compounds. German writes compounds as one word: Handschuh ("glove", literally "hand shoe"), Kühlschrank ("fridge", "cool cupboard"). It can join words without limit, and the result is a new word that no dictionary needs to list because any speaker can understand it. English writes most of its compounds with spaces, ice cream and bus stop, and so does not count them as words at all. The longest examples, and which of them people actually say, are in the longest German words.

Words built from parts. In languages such as Turkish and Finnish, a word can carry what English says in a sentence, through a chain of endings. Every such chain is a word, so these languages have, in principle, millions of word forms.

Characters or words. Chinese has a few thousand characters in common use and hundreds of thousands of words made from them. Which you count gives two answers that differ a hundredfold: see how many words are in Chinese.

Borrowing and slang. Every language takes words from others and invents new ones daily. No dictionary keeps up, and each one decides differently how long to wait before admitting a word.

How linguists get round these problems when they measure a person's vocabulary, by sampling a dictionary or by testing with made-up words, is explained in how vocabulary size is measured.

A measured comparison: seven languages in film and TV

A dictionary measures lexicographers. A large record of speech measures the language as it is used. We took the film and television subtitles of seven languages and asked one question of each: in 50 million words of dialogue, how many different word forms appear? The collections are of different sizes, and a bigger collection always contains more different words, so every language is measured at exactly the same size.

German uses the most different words, 554,202 in 50 million words of dialogue. That is compounding at work: every Hundefutter and Polizeiwagen counts as a word of its own.

Mandarin comes second, at 519,072, with a caution: Chinese is written without spaces between words, so where one word ends and the next begins had to be decided before anything could be counted, and a different decision would give a different total.

English is fifth, at 366,441, close to Italian and below Spanish. English has few word endings, so want is one form where Spanish has quiero, quieres, quiere and dozens more. Each of those counts as a different form, and Spanish comes out ahead.

Portuguese and French use the fewest, in this measure. Neither has a small vocabulary: what the count shows is how many different spellings their speech produces, and their verbs, like English, repeat a smaller set of forms.

The ranking is about word forms, so it rewards languages with many endings and many compounds. Measured as dictionary words, the order would change. That is the honest answer to the question: the language with the most words is whichever one your way of counting favours.

The answer that matters for a learner

Whatever the size of a language, the words people say most are few and the same. In every language measured on this site, the 1,000 most common words make up about three quarters or more of film and television dialogue, and the first hundred alone about half: see English, Italian, German and Portuguese. How many words each language needs before a learner can follow a conversation is set out language by language:

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Mandarin
• Esperanto

All seven are compared on one chart in which language has the steepest frequency curve. Verbavia (our own course) teaches each of them in frequency order, the most useful words first, free on the web.

Sources

• The dictionary figures are from this site's pages on English, French, Spanish and Chinese, each of which cites its dictionaries.
• The comparison uses the standard rarefaction formula: the expected number of different forms in a sample of n words is the sum, over every form, of 1 − (1 − c/N)ⁿ, where c is the form's count and N the size of the whole collection.
• 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.