The Walrus and the Computer were walking close at hand - in Texas. They laughed like anything to see such quantities of Spam. “Zombie banks splat ‘n’ turnuptoes in the financial tsunami.” If seven n00bs with seven laptops surfed the net for half a year, and were then laid end-to-end, the number-crunchers would all come up with different answers to: “How many words in the English lexicon?”

It depends on what you count as a word. There is no corpus available in a countable form which represents the swirling Cyberspace oceans of English. Even if there were, it would indicate only what was available when the count started. It would therefore be a static assessment of a dynamic process. The sums go out of date as soon as they start. Opinions of what counts as a word differ. One man’s meat is another woman’s poisson.

Take the “-ing” ending of the present participle. Is every item ending in “-ing” a distinct word? Or are “running” and “walking” merely inflected forms of the verb, like “runs” and “walks”? Or should we count only some instances, like “clearing” and “drawing”, because these are used as distinct nouns, with the plurals “clearings” and “drawings”; and ignore the rest? In that case, how do we count hapax legomena rarities such as “rustlings and twitterings among the trees”? How will the counters handle the fact that many participular “-ing” forms can be so used, even if nobody has got round to doing so yet?

Aargh. The overall vocabulary of English is beyond strict statistical computation. Nevertheless, rough indications are possible. Shakespeare’s vocabulary is variously listed as c. 25,000 to c. 34,000. Some say that the average English-speaker uses 15,000 words (but are “count” and “counting” separate words? See above). The Oxford English Dictionary defines more than half a million items described as “words”. The average college, desk, or family dictionary defines more than 100,000 such items. Specialist dictionaries contain vast lists of words and items like words. For example the latest dictionary of acronyms and abbrevs contains more than 450,000 accredited abbreviations, and rising by the hour. Take in lists of classical, geographical, zoological, botanical, psychological, medical, electronic and other specialised usages. Take in everybody’s personal idiolect.

Nice try Global Language Monitor. But the crude but credible total for words and word-like forms in today’s English is not a million - but somewhere over a billion items.

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