National Dictionary Day on ABC World News (must-see!)

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>So Ben, does English have 1 billion or 2 billion words?  And what
>does "word" mean?
>Say 100 words with definitions would fit on a page, then it would
>take 10,000 pages to list 1 billion.

Let's try that again! A billion (US) is a thousand million
(1,000,000,000). At 100 headwords per page, a billion headwords would
require 10,000,000 (ten million) pages. Obviously an unwieldy dictionary.

A _million_ headwords at 100 per page will require 10,000 pages: a
book the size of the OED, roughly, I guess. Not infeasible at all.

It is reasonable to say that there are about a million English
words/lexemes, as an order-of-magnitude estimate. Of course it
depends on criteria for inclusion, distinctness, etc., etc. Crystal
("Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language") gives a million
(1,000,000) as a conservative estimate, gives 500,000 as the
approximate number of headwords in a large dictionary (OED, 1992),
gives 2,000,000 as a reasonable possibility.

There is no possibility of a billion distinct lexical items, IMHO ...
as I think Ben Zimmer pointed out.

-- Doug Wilson


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