How many words are in English. Vocabulary: how many words you need to know

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When learning any language, including English, the lion's share of the process itself is devoted to memorization. As we improve our language proficiency, we try to expand our vocabulary as efficiently as possible. Then, skillfully connecting the necessary words with the help of certain rules, we begin to speak English, to understand English speech, both spoken and written. But here's the catch: almost every person studying English asks the question, how many words are in English, and how many of them do you need to know in order to use English fluently in life? Let's take a look at what linguists think about this.

How many words are there in English?

There is no definite answer to this question, since there is no single system for counting words in the English language. Someone thinks that only words should be counted, not taking into account their word forms. And someone, on the contrary, counts everything together, taking into account slang, terms, specialized vocabulary. However, we will rely on information provided by a specific organization based in Texas, USA.

We are talking about the company " Global Language Monitor» ( GLM), which observes and records the spread of words of the English language around the world. The organization began this activity seven years ago. GLM takes into account the words entered in the generally accepted dictionaries of the English language ( Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster's, Macquarie's), calculates new language formations in paper and electronic media, scientific and technical literature, blogs, social networks.

So how many words are there in English at the moment? According to GLM, now English counts 1 million 4,910 words... Moreover, according to statistics, a new word in the English language appears every 98 minutes (14.7 words per day). But the millionth milestone was crossed on June 10 last year at 10.22, when this company recorded another new word Web 2.0, denoting a new generation of the worldwide computer network.

If you are interested in the activities of the company " Global Language Monitor», You can follow her progress by adding to your page on social networks, for this you need the following link:. If your level of English is high enough, you can watch a video of the interview taken by the channel. BBC from the leading linguist, Professor David Crystal. In fact, a very interesting video about why the English language is so calm and easy to borrow words from different languages, as well as easily creates them itself. The video recording and information about the millionth word, its five predecessors and one follower (albeit all in English) can be seen on the same resource, only under a different link:.

Now we know the answer to the question how many words are in English... By the way, in order to be registered and receive the status of a “new” word, it first has to be mentioned in the media and social networks at least 25 thousand times. That is, the path is not easy, but the reward is worth it - the opportunity to be included in the vocabulary of the English language!

There are more than a million words. It is clear that no one will ever know them all. How can you determine how many words in English you need to learn in order to be able to master it? According to the calculations of linguists, the average person needs to use the 1500 most common words to communicate in everyday life. They, in theory, should provide almost 100% of the normal perception of spoken language. If we are talking about reading in English, then for reading comprehension we need another figure - 3000-4000 words. But written speech will require five thousand more words. In general, the active vocabulary of an educated person is from 10 to 20 thousand words. The liabilities may be two or even three times more. The 70,000-word limit makes it possible to call a person “linguistically gifted”.

In any case, you need not only to expand your vocabulary, but also to do it efficiently. In this case, the principle “less is more” works. It will be much easier for you if you know a few hundred of the most common words than a couple thousand of those that are rarely used. However, no matter how hard you study, English lives with us and grows with us. You will always come across words that will appear over and over again. How many words are there in English? This figure will change each time. It's not worth making a problem out of this, but it can be very useful to keep track of language innovations. Go for it!

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A very common question that is asked by those who start learning English is "how many English words do you need to learn in order to communicate fluently on everyday topics." Play freely with foreign words, express all your non-trivial ideas and perfectly understand your interlocutor - for some, these are only dreams, but for others - goals.

Dictionaries and concepts

In this article, the author will try to delve into the question of quantity, but first of all, think about whether you have ever had a question about how many words there are in English in general. In fact, there is not a single reasonable answer to this question. Why is that? Simply put, there is no way to count the number of words in a language because it is very difficult to determine what actually counts as "one". For example, the word set has 464 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. Should we treat all definitions as one word, or should each definition be considered a separate unit? And what about phrasal verbs like set apart, set about, set up? What about difficult words like hot dog, real estate, or ice cream? It is difficult to find a definite answer.

How many words are there in English?

A person constantly invents new concepts, changes existing ones, or stops using them altogether. Should they all become part of our vocabulary? Teenage slang? Abbreviations? Medical and scientific terms? And how many Latin words in English are used in jurisprudence? And if you dig deeper, there are many French words in the culinary field, in the scientific literature - in German, and in the field of martial arts - in Japanese. What do we do with all this diversity?

But back to the quantitative question. English is the leader in terms of the number of borrowings, and we are talking about millions, so the question of how many words are in the language disappears by itself. So why are only 171,476 words (according to the Oxford Dictionary) in direct use? Again, when comparing the largest dictionaries, we must pay attention to whether the dictionary includes obsolete, dialectal or scientific words.

The reason why the largest dictionary gives such an answer to the question "how many words are in the English language" is clear - it excludes endings, does not cover some technical and regional vocabulary, and obviously does not include neologisms (new words). It can be assumed that if the above were counted and published in the Oxford Dictionary, then the total number of units would probably be close to ¾ million.

How many words in English do you need to know?

"Green Eggs and Ham" is a book written by Dr. Seuss (real name - Theodore Seuss Geisel), in which the amount of vocabulary used does not exceed fifty units. This piece is the result of a bet between Seuss and his publisher, Bennett Cerf, that Seuss (after the Cat in the Hat was published in 225 words) could not complete an entire book with so few words.

Obviously, if you can write an entire work using only 50 words, then there is no doubt that there is no great need for a vocabulary of 40,000 words. According to research by Susie Dent, a vocabulary expert and lexicographer, the average adult English speaker's passive vocabulary is about 40,000 words, and the active vocabulary is about 20,000.

What is the difference between passive and active vocabulary? Active consists of words that you can remember and use freely in your speech. Passive, on the other hand, are lexical units that you can recognize and understand, but are not able to use on your own.

Now comes the fun part!

Let's figure out, finally, how many words in English you need to know. Despite the fact that the average adult native speaker has an active vocabulary of about 20,000, statistics show that:

1) the first 25 units are used in 33% of everyday written speech;

2) the first 100 appear in writing in adults and students in 50% of cases;

3) the first 1000 are used in 89% of the writing every day!

Naturally, if each time a person strives for a higher percentage, the number of words begins to increase sharply (especially after understanding 95%), but a vocabulary of 3 thousand words covers about 95% of information from common texts (for example, news, blogs, etc.). etc.).

Mathematical calculation

Now you can plunge into the calculations to find out how many words in English you need to know. As already noted, the modern Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words, while a vocabulary of 3,000 words provides understanding of 95% of the texts available to the world. If you make a calculation, then this is only 1.75% of the total number of words! And, indeed, knowing only 1.75%, you will be able to understand 95% of the material. In addition, this is another 7 and a half percent of the average passive vocabulary of an adult native English speaker. Isn't that good news?

Develop flexible thinking

The goal is to understand 95% of words from everyday life. Why exactly this amount? It is necessary in order to understand well enough, for example, why your interlocutor smiles so mysteriously. In addition, by understanding most of the vocabulary, you can guess the meaning of the remaining 5-10%.

Rigidity of thinking is extremely common among language learners and disappears completely when it comes to the native language. After all, how often do we refer to the dictionary when reading in our native language? The answer is likely to be negative, even if you are uncertain about the meanings of some words. Thinking flexibility is really important when it comes to learning a foreign language, for the simple reason that it is impossible to learn every definition of even the same word set.

The Pareto Principle and Learning English

If we talk about the well-known Pareto principle in the context of learning, then only 20% of the efforts bring 80% of the knowledge to foreign learners, with which they can really work - to understand by ear, read news and books, and communicate clearly. To speak English fluently and understand 90% of frequently used words, you must first of all work 100%. If the minimum lexical minimum is 3000 units, then this should be exactly the 80% that you need to know.

Gold number

Languages ​​contain an incredible amount of words, and many people perceive the study of a foreign language as an insurmountable barrier that takes decades to achieve any result. With confidence in your intuition (guess at the context) when learning a language from scratch and gradual "building" a good level of vocabulary, you can reach a fairly quickly - a level at which you will be fluent in reading texts in English and understand 95% of the information. Up to 2500-3000 units - this is exactly as many English words you need to know at a minimum. This is, in essence, a "golden" number, since this number of words is enough not to make reading in a foreign language depressing. More importantly, it is necessary to know exactly such a number of lexical units in order to be able to easily guess the meaning of words from the context.

Languages ​​evolve and constantly change, all thanks to the creativity and imagination of humanity. In the end, Shakespeare alone came up with 1,700 new words!

English learners often ask the question, “When will I be able to speak fluently? How many English words do you need to know for this? " Different sources give different answers on this matter; they have not come to a common opinion on this issue. We decided to give an opinion based on the experience of our English teachers.

How many English words do you need to know to speak fluently: myths

How many English words do you need to know to speak fluently: 1000 or 10000? The concept of "the minimum required vocabulary" is a subtle and ambiguous thing. There are 500,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary: a daunting number and not at all encouraging for English learners. According to statistics, a native English speaker actively uses between 15,000 and 40,000 words. This is the vocabulary that a person uses in writing or speaking - active vocabulary. Passive vocabulary (words that a native speaker recognizes when speaking or reading, but does not use in speech) reaches 100,000 words. In the article "" you can read about these concepts in detail.

The Internet is now actively discussing the opinion of the "magic thousand English words." According to this hypothesis, a person needs to know only 1000 words of the English language in order to communicate freely on any everyday topic. Agree, it's great: if you consider that we learn 10 new words a day, then in just over 3 months we will be able to communicate freely!

At the same time, the vocabulary of a 4-5-year-old child has an average of 1200 to 1500 words, and an 8-year-old child has about 3000 words. Does 1000 words really give you freedom of speech? We believe that 1000 words is not enough for normal communication at the level of an adult. Where did this figure come from then? Perhaps the whole thing is in the study of British scientists: they found out that any author of an average text (excluding literary masterpieces) uses a vocabulary of only 1000 words. However, no one specifies that the composition of this 1000 is different for each author. Each person has his own vocabulary, which he uses when writing texts.

Some people advocate 1000 words for a different reason: they believe that in order to communicate fluently in English, you need to learn a thousand of the most common words. You can even find special frequency dictionaries on the Internet. However, if you look at such a publication, it becomes clear that with this thousand words you will not go far: about a third of them are prepositions (in, at, on), various types of pronouns (he, she, his, her), interrogative words (where , why, what), numerals (first, second), etc. With such a set, it will be difficult to make a meaningful sentence. In addition, when writing irregular verbs, the authors of dictionaries do not indicate all three forms at once, but arrange them in three places according to their frequency. For example, the word keep is included in the first 200 words (according to various sources, 167-169th place), kept is in the 763-765th place. This approach to irregular verbs is inconvenient: it is better to learn all three forms of the verb at once, so it is easier to remember them.

However, not all frequency publications are bad. You can use them, but choose the RIGHT words for communication, in particular verbs and nouns. In a sentence, the verb plays a major role, because in any sentence there is an action (go, break, speak) or a state (be, exist) of an object expressed by a verb. It makes sense to study the lists of the most commonly used verbs in the English language. For example, beginners can be advised to master a list of 100 verbs - all of them are voiced, given in three forms at once. And those who continue can familiarize themselves with a list of 1000 most frequent verbs, and there you can also see examples of their use in different contexts.

If you completely "lower the bar", then you can focus on the vocabulary of Ellochka the ogre: she calmly got along with 30 words. However, if you do not want to be a "cannibal" and want to speak at the level of an adult, you will need to learn more English words.

As vocabulary is reduced, so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify!

If your vocabulary decreases, it also decreases the number of feelings that you can express, the number of events that can be described, the number of things that can be named.

How many English words do you need to know to speak fluently: reality

Now let's put mythology aside and decide how many words are needed to communicate fluently in English. And again we turn to statistics, it, like facts, is a stubborn thing. To understand 80-90% of the text of a general topic, it is enough to know about 3000 words; it is this figure that various studies of foreign scientists declare. You can read the details at lextutor.ca. Oxford learner's Dictionaries also offers 3000 words for English learners. However, this is still not enough for FREE communication in English. As you read, you will guess the meaning of many words from context. In addition, of these 3000, some of the words will be in your passive vocabulary, that is, you will recognize many words when speaking or reading, but not using them in speech.

To speak truly fluently, you need to “activate” your passive vocabulary: 3000 in the active vocabulary is a confident or initial step. With this level of knowledge, a person can speak on general conversation topics rather fluently and confidently.

Thus, we came to the conclusion that 3000 words is the necessary minimum for a conversation on general topics. It is possible to reach such a level “from scratch” in about 1.5-2.5 years (depending on the intensity of the classes, the student's efforts, etc.). To express yourself truly FREELY, you need to know about 5000-6000 words. This vocabulary corresponds to the level, and this is already 3-4 years of learning English "from scratch".

Don't you speak English yet? Start mastering the first 1000 words! You can calculate the time frame in another way: if you tirelessly learn 10 words a day, then a stock of 3000 words can be acquired in just a year of study. However, remember that memorizing the words is not enough. To learn to speak, you need to learn grammar in order to understand how to build a sentence. Most importantly, you need to speak English as often as possible. You need to be able to operate with any vocabulary, then even with 1000 words in your pocket, you can, if necessary, communicate in English on a simple topic.

As you can see, it takes about 3000-5000 words to communicate fluently in English, your willingness to speak and hard work. Want to make it easier for yourself to memorize so many English words? Try it with one of our teachers. You will significantly expand your vocabulary and learn how to use the learned vocabulary correctly in speech.

The fact that the dictionary of the language contains about 300 thousand words is only of theoretical interest for a beginner to learn this language. Perhaps the main principle for the rational organization of their studies, especially at the initial stage, is the economy of words. You need to learn to memorize as few words as possible, but do it as best you can.

Let us emphasize that our approach is directly opposite to the leading principle of "suggestionstopedia", with its emphasis on the abundance of words presented to the student. As you know, in accordance with its canons, the beginner must be literally "showered with words." It is best to ask him or her 200 new words every day.

Is there any doubt that any normal person will forget all the many words that he was "showered" with in this, if I may say so, method - and most likely very soon, in just a few days.

Don't chase much

It will be much better if at the end of a certain stage of the class you know 500 or 1000 words very well than 3000 - but poorly. Don't be overwhelmed by educators who will assure you that you need to learn a certain number of words first in order to "get on board." Only you yourself can and must decide whether the vocabulary you have mastered is sufficient for your goals and interests.

Experience in language learning shows that about 400 correctly chosen words can cover up to 90 percent of the vocabulary you need for everyday communication. It takes more words to read, but many of them are only passive. Therefore, with knowledge of 1500 words, you will already be able to understand sufficiently meaningful texts.

It is better to master the words that are most necessary and important to you than to constantly rush to learn new ones. “Anyone who has chased too much runs the risk of missing everything,” says a Swedish proverb. "If you chase two hares, you won't catch a single one," a Russian proverb answers her.

Oral vocabulary

Very roughly, about 40 correctly chosen, high-frequency words will cover about 50% of word usage in everyday speech in any language;

• 200 words will cover about 80%;
• 300 words - about 85%;
• 400 words will cover about 90%;
• well, 800-1000 words is about 95% of what will need to be said or heard in the most ordinary situation.

Thus, a well-chosen vocabulary helps to understand quite a lot with a very modest effort spent on cramming.

Example: if only 1000 words are said in everyday conversation, then 500 of them, that is 50%, will be covered by 40 of the most common high-frequency words.

We emphasize that these percentages, of course, are not the result of precise calculations. They just give the most general idea of ​​how many words it will take to feel confident, entering into the simplest dialogue with a native speaker. In any case, there is no doubt that, having correctly chosen from 400 to 800 words and memorizing them well, you can feel confident in a simple conversation, since they will cover almost 100% of those words that you cannot do without. Of course, under other, less favorable conditions, 400 words will cover only 80% of what you need to know - instead of 90 or 100%.

Reading vocabulary

When reading, having correctly chosen and well remembered about 80 of the most common, most frequent words, you will understand about 50% of the simple text;

• 200 words will cover about 60%;
• 300 words - 65%;
• 400 words - 70%;
• 800 words - about 80%;
• 1,500 - 2,000 words - about 90%;
• 3000 - 4000 - 95%;
• and 8000 words will cover nearly 99 percent of the written text.

Example: if you have a text of about 10 thousand words in front of you (this is about 40 printed pages), then, having learned the most necessary 400 words in advance, you will understand about 7000 words that are used in this text.

Note again that the numbers we give are only indicative. Depending on a variety of additional conditions, 50 words will cover up to 50 percent of the written text, but in other cases, you will need to learn at least 150 words to get the same result.

Vocabulary: 400 to 100,000 words

• 400 - 500 words - active vocabulary for language proficiency at the basic (threshold) level.
• 800 - 1000 words - active vocabulary for explaining yourself; or a passive vocabulary for basic reading.
• 1500 - 2000 words - active vocabulary, which is quite enough to ensure everyday communication throughout the day; or passive vocabulary sufficient for confident reading.
• 3000 - 4000 words - in general, it is enough for practically free reading of newspapers or literature in the specialty.
• About 8000 words - Provide meaningful communication for the average European. You practically don't need to know more words in order to communicate freely both orally and in writing, as well as to read literature of any kind.
• 10,000-20,000 words - active vocabulary of an educated European (in their native language).
• 50,000-100,000 words - the passive vocabulary of an educated European (in their native language).

It should be noted that vocabulary by itself does not yet ensure free communication. At the same time, having mastered 1,500 correctly chosen words, with some additional training, you will be able to communicate almost fluently.

As for professional terms, they usually do not present any particular difficulties, since in most cases it is an international vocabulary that is easy enough to master.

When you already know about 1500 words, you can start reading at a fairly decent level. With a passive knowledge of 3,000 to 4,000 words, you will be fluent in reading specialty literature, at least in those areas where you are confident in your orientation. In conclusion, we note that, according to the calculations carried out by linguists on the material of a number of languages, the average educated European actively uses about 20,000 words (and half of them are quite rare). In this case, the passive vocabulary is at least 50,000 words. But all this concerns the native language.

Basic vocabulary

In the pedagogical literature, you can find the terminological combination "basic vocabulary". From my point of view, at the maximum level, the vocabulary is about 8000 words. It seems to me that it is hardly necessary to learn more words, except perhaps for some special purpose. Eight thousand words will be enough for full-fledged communication in any conditions.

When starting to learn a language, it may be wise to get by with shorter lists. Here are three levels that I have identified in practice as providing a good guideline for a beginner:

• level A("basic vocabulary"):

400-500 words. They are enough to cover about 90% of all word usage in everyday oral communication or about 70% of a simple written text;

• level B("minimum vocabulary", "mini-level"):

800-1000 words. They are enough to cover about 95% of all word usage in everyday oral communication, or about 80-85% of the written text;

• level B("average vocabulary", "copper-level"):

1500-2000 words. They are enough to cover about 95-100% of all word usage in everyday oral communication, or about 90% of the written text.

An example of a good dictionary of the basic vocabulary is the dictionary published by E. Klett in Stuttgart, 1971, called "Grundwortschatz Deutsch" ("Basic vocabulary of the German language"). It contains 2,000 essential words in each of the selected six languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian.

Eric W. Gunnemark, Swedish polyglot

The vocabulary of the English language is rapidly and quickly filled with new lexical units. Scientists have calculated that an average of 15 new words appear per day, but not all of them take root in the language, but only those that are most widespread.

If not "Selfie" in 2013, we would never have known that a snapshot of ourselves has a specific name. Following him came the well-known today "Bookfie","Shelfie", "Legsie" and others, which can often be found on social networks in the form of hashtags. If you are a person who does not complain about fantasy, you can come up with your own word ending in "Sie" / "fie", post it on a social network and see what the effect will be.

Printed dictionaries and word count

About 15 years ago, you could buy an English dictionary containing 500 000 words. At that time, such a number seemed pretty decent even for a linguist, because, according to scientists, the average person uses about 5,000 words in his speech. This is what is called the active dictionary. All other lexical units remain passive: we can recognize and understand them in texts, but not use them in everyday speech.

How many words do you need to know?

Now let's move on to the question of how many words in English you need to know. It all depends on how to speak, with whom to speak and what topics to discuss. In order to communicate with a pen pal, 500-1000 words will be enough, including verbs, nouns and adjectives. For comparison, the active vocabulary of a native speaker is 15,000 to 40,000 words... However, it is worth making a reservation here so that every English learner does not think that you can master a thousand words and chat freely. This thousand is different for everyone. And if you look into the frequency dictionary, it becomes clear that most of the vocabulary is made up of prepositions, pronouns, numerals, interrogative words, which may not be used at all in a conversation.

According to the authors of the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, in order to understand 80-90% of the text, 3,000 words are needed, which roughly corresponds to the Intermediate level.

In order for words not to go into passive, they need to be used regularly - repeated at regular intervals. Better yet, work with flash cards that allow you to repeat everything that has been passed at any time.

In order not to guess the meaning of the phrases, but to know them for sure, you will need a little more units - approximately 5,000 - 6,000... With such a margin, you can freely read books, watch films, and communicate on the most common topics.

GLM and new words in English

If we look at the GLM (Global Language Monitor), we can see how many words in the English language regularly appear and become popular. And this is neither more nor less than 1,041,258 (at the time of this writing). And this number is constantly growing. Despite such a vocabulary boom, this does not mean that everyone will be able to actively use new words, so you should focus on the most frequently used units.

You may ask, how do words become popular, who popularizes them? Of course, the media and social networks. In order for a word to be included in the GLM list, it must be repeated at least 25,000 times, while affecting a certain breadth and depth of use. Depth is the form of words in the media, and breadth is its spread throughout the world.

What words are popular today?

Bigly is extremely, very, strong. Became popular after Donald Trump in a speech in a different sense, "I" m going to cut taxes bigly, and you "re going to raise taxes bigly. in the right context. ”Later it turned out that Trump was using the expression“ big league, ”but that no longer mattered.

Below you can see the most popular words today:

• Brexit - UK exit from the European Union;
• non-binary - polysexuality, attraction to several genders;
• memory care - fight against Alzheimer's disease;
• texticate - write messages on social networks;
• trumpism - the style of thinking and behavior of a republican;
• futebol is a variation on the theme of football. The world first saw this word in Brazil in 2011;
• emoticons. smileys, emoji’s - all used emoticons (smiles) in correspondence. Since 2013, these words have become especially popular;
• Chinglish - Chinese-English. However, these words are enough today to understand that the same variable English is spreading around the world at lightning speed.

In December 2016, the expression Web 2.0 appeared, a technical term for a new generation of web products and services. Interestingly, the word 1 00 001 became “financial tsunami” - a global financial restructuring that came out of nowhere and took away trillions of dollars.

This term was preceded by the following words:

• jai ho - long live victory (translated from Hindi);
• N00b is a derogatory name for a beginner who makes unforgivable mistakes;
• slumdog - a person living in a slum;
• cloud computing - cloud computing;
• carbon neutral - with a neutral index of carbon release;
• slow food - movement against the fast food system;
• octomom - mother of "eight" Nadia Suleman;
• greenwashing - green camouflage, a form of eco-marketing that uses methods that indicate the sustainability of goods;
• defriend - remove from the friends list, "defriend".

So how many basic words are there?

It is quite difficult to answer the question of how many basic words there are in the English language, since these very basic words can vary from person to person. You can select an average of 150-200 verbs and 500 nouns, connect all this with prepositions and pronouns and see what happens.

People who are starting to learn English are often interested in the question of how many English words to learn per day. You should not load yourself with 50 or 100 words a day, so you will not last long, 10-15 words will be enough to simultaneously replenish your stock and not lose your desire to learn English.

For the most up-to-date information, take a look at. Thanks to the self-study guide, you will learn English without leaving your home, and the articles will help you answer all your questions.