How many words in English and how many does one know?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 10/31/07, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Googling on "How many words are there in English" I find counts below.  Far
>  short of a billion.
>
> http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm

Just to repeat: no one is claiming that there are a billion words in
English. As I explained the first time Tom brought it up (on Oct. 18),
headlines last year proclaiming "English Language Hits 1 Billion
Words" were based on a misunderstanding: the Oxford English Corpus had
reached the one-billion-word mark, meaning that the OEC contained a
billion *tokens* (instances of words in the collected texts), rather
than a billion distinct lexical items. (As the OEC continues to grow,
that figure has now surpassed two billion.)

Once again, here is a link to my Language Log post discussing the
erroneous headlines:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003073.html


--Ben Zimmer

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