How many words are there in the world? Which language has more words? How many words are there in Russian and how many words are there in English?

Language is quantitatively incalculable

The question seems to be very simple to answer. It is enough to turn to the most authoritative of modern dictionaries - the Great Academic Dictionary in 17 volumes.BAS - this is how philologists unofficially call this publication; its titular title is “Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language”.

It is worth remembering here that in 1970 this work was awarded the Lenin Prize. Unfortunately, from the first day it was published, it became a bibliographic rarity, and today it is less known and accessible to the average reader than the famous, but somewhat outdated Dahl dictionary. So, in The Large Academic Dictionary contains 131,257 words.

Thus, the indicated number can “grow” if we count adverbs ending in -о, -е, formedfrom qualitative adjectives, such as frankly (from frank), silently (from silent) - they are listed in the dictionary not as independent units, but in articles with the original adjectives.

But these are still, so to speak, flowers... As the name of the dictionary itself indicates, it includes only words of a literary, that is, standardized, language.

Meanwhile,The national Russian language is rich in a huge number of languages still in use today. rural areas and dialect words not fully taken into account by any dictionary, like the Vologda nuhrit in the meaning of search or the noun potka (bird), which exists in Vyatka villages, etc.

Of course, the enormous wealth of dialect vocabulary (but again far from exhaustive!) reflectedDahl's dictionary , compiled in the century before last. In total, it contains more than 200 thousand vocabulary units. There are also modern dictionaries Russian dialects produced in one region or another.

However, if dialectisms are not characteristic literary language(with the exception of artistic speech), then it very often uses words of a different type, which you also will not find in general explanatory dictionaries, even the most complete ones. These are terms, proper names, neologisms and some other categories of words.

Let’s take a common newspaper phrase: “This unique textbook on computer optics was created by a team of employees from the Institute of Image Processing Systems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by a famous scientist.” Here all the words are generally understandable and commonly used.

However, the Big Academic Dictionary does not contain the abbreviation RAS (linguists today recognize abbreviations as independent words, separate from the decoding; by the way, there are special dictionaries of abbreviated words), as well as the adjective computer, which, however, like the original noun computer, simply could not get into the dictionary , created about half a century ago.

New words that have appeared in the Russian language over the past decades, especially associated with the rapid changes in social life of the 90s, should have been reflected in the 2nd edition of the Great Academic Dictionary in 20 volumes. But... after the 4th volume, published in 1993, the matter died out.

A special area of vocabulary is terminology - the designation of scientific and technical concepts. They are known and used only among specialists in one or another scientific and technical field. It is unlikely that anyone is familiar with, for example, such words as zignella - a type of algae (bot.), izafet - a type of phrase in some languages (linguistic), etc. In principle, one person cannot know all the terms used in our language - due to their enormous number. Each science and technical branch has developed its own terminology, sometimes consisting of tens of thousands of units.

Imagine, for example, how many of them are contained in a multi-volume medical encyclopedia!

Proper nouns constitute such a lexical layer of the national language (bearing a special name - “onomastics”), which, apparently, cannot be even approximately quantified. In fact, how many, say, in Russian Federation cities and villages, rivers and lakes, areas and mountains? Well-known, as in any other country, are the names of more or less large geographical objects (Volga, Ural, Paris, Seine) - they form only a small percentage of all toponymy. The lion's share consists of toponyms used by local residents in a limited area, where often a ravine or stream, a hillock or a grove have their own name. For example, in the Samara region there is the village of Molgachi. If residents use “I was in Molgachi”, “I am from Molgachi” in speech, it means that it is part of the Russian language, regardless of its origin! And how many space objects have their own names - so-called astronims!

There is one more significant remark. In linguistics there is generally no precise and comprehensive definition, what is a word.

It is not the linguists who are “guilty” of this, but the extreme complexity of such a phenomenon as language. A simple example: are go and walked two words or variations of one? Also: house and little house? The issue is not so easy to resolve. After all, if we consider all participles (walked), gerunds, forms of subjective assessment (domishko) and other formations as separate words and include them in the dictionary, it can swell so much that one copy of it will not fit, perhaps, in a medium-sized room. Exaggeration? Then try to estimate for yourself the number of so-called potential words, which are not stable units of language, but appear in speech out of necessity and at the same time are very similar in appearance to those that we usually use. These, in particular, include complex adjectives with the first component - a numeral.

For example: two-ruble, twelve-ruble, one-day, thirty-day, six hundred eighty-five kilometer, etc. My computer underlined the last two words as non-existent(?!). Let’s experiment further: one-legged, two-legged, three-legged, four-legged, five-legged... The computer confidently emphasized the penultimate word, and “hesitating”, and the last one.

How many such words can, in principle, appear in speech?And how many of them were actually used over the past two centuries - is this approximately how the age of the modern Russian language is estimated? Should I include them all in the dictionary or not? Only a few of these formations are recorded in the Big Academic Dictionary.

It is impossible to count all the words of a particular living language because it does not remain unchanged for a single day. Some words or their individual meanings go out of use, new ones appear, and it is, of course, impossible to record each such fact, since this process is gradual and, as a rule, elusive.

So, if we talk about some specific, limited “section” of the language, then a more or less exact number of words is known: the number of the most common ones in different styles and genres - about 40 thousand (according to the "Frequency Dictionary of the Russian Language" edited by L.N. Zasorina. M., 1977). You can also mention, for example, the number of the most commonly used abbreviations - about 18 thousand (see: Alekseev D.I. et al. “Dictionary of abbreviations of the Russian language.” M., 1983). Against the background of data on the lexical wealth of the entire national language, the volume of a personal vocabulary, or, as linguists say, the volume of an active vocabulary, that is, the number of words used by one person, is of interest. For an educated “mere mortal” it is estimated at an average of 5-10 thousand words.

But even here there are peaks. Thus, in the “Dictionary of the Pushkin Language” in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961), an unsurpassed figure is recorded - approximately 24 thousand. Only the “Dictionary of the Language of V. I. Lenin,” which was prepared for a long time for publication by the Institute of the Russian Language and, for obvious reasons, was never published, according to some sources, should have included about 30 thousand words. But today, in the absence of the dictionary itself, it is difficult to judge what was more in this promised record - genius or ideology.

There are statistical characteristics for many other local manifestations. No one can count absolutely all the words of the popular modern Russian language - neither scientists, nor the most powerful computer. That is why linguists came to the conclusion:language is quantitatively incalculable. published

P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness, we are changing the world together! © econet

I believe that in our modern world It is very difficult to do without means of communication. But in the distant past, communication between us humans differed from communication between animals only in cave paintings. I often think about the fact that the greatest acquisition of civilization is word and speech in particular.

Search for the record-breaking language by number of words

In the underdeveloped peoples of Africa modern languages contain up to four hundred words, is it necessary to talk about writing? It is worth recalling that average resident leading countries in the world throughout my life studies about 100,000 and actively uses about 15–50 thousand.

After digging a little into the figures from official sources, I found an answer that is not quite obvious, but let’s leave the best part for later.

Eastern languages

Yes, I immediately thought about distant countries and many complex hieroglyphs in languages, for example in:

Japanese philologists count up to 120 000 individual words;
Chinese- this Asian language has about 500 000, including dialects;
Korean- well, there’s very little here, just 100 000.

The slightest stick or blot radically changes the essence of the whole sentence that can fit into the symbol. Therefore, calligraphy is very important for those regions.

The most extensive of them, as we see, is Chinese. Common speakers of this language Approximately 5,000 hieroglyphs are used.

I was not satisfied with this result and went looking further.

Russian

Like a true patriot, I immediately thought about my elegant and colorful language, quoting the great classic: “I would learn Russian only because Lenin spoke it.” But can a native singer compete in the number of words, for example, with the same Chinese? Alas, dictionaries and philologists say that it cannot: further two hundred thousand didn't count.

English

« The international language must be the most complete, so that all people in the world can one day understand each other!” - it came to me.

He is twice as ahead of the previous contender for this title! Yes, yes, it contains in itself over a million words despite the fact that every day absorbs approximately fifteen new. How pleasant it is to study him, each time expanding my range of knowledge and realizing that he still has something to pleasantly surprise me with! But my heart told me that this was not the limit and I continued to dig further.

Italian

In Naples, near the Royal Palace, during a tour, the guide once mentioned that theoretically the richest language in the world is Italian. This is all due to the fact that all compound numerals are written together in words. And this means that words are simply impossible to count, since the number series is infinite.

But is it possible to communicate using numbers alone? Yes, if you assign a serial number to each word, for example. Will it be convenient? No. Therefore, we quench our thirst for further knowledge.

Arab

This language is the undisputed leader, since there are whole words six million! Who would have thought that it is precisely this language that is the most colorful and huge. This is a place for your inner storyteller to roam! The language of barren sand dunes and luxurious Dubai buildings enchants with its oriental charm from the first syllables.

There should be a lot of good words in a good language!

Candidate of Philological Sciences S. KARPUKHIN, (Samara).

A miniature from the Radziwill Chronicle (XIII century), which depicts the creators of the alphabet, Cyril and Methodius.

"Primer" by Karion Istomin. Copper engraving by L. Bunin (1694).

The first secular engraving appeared in V. F. Burtsev's "ABC" (1637). At the top left is the inscription: "school".

The question seems to be very simple to answer. It is enough to turn to the most authoritative of modern dictionaries - the Large Academic Dictionary in 17 volumes. BAS - this is how philologists unofficially call this publication; its titular title is “Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language”. It is worth remembering here that in 1970 this work was awarded the Lenin Prize. Unfortunately, from the first day it was published, it became a bibliographic rarity, and today it is less known and accessible to the average reader than the famous, but somewhat outdated Dahl dictionary. So, the Big Academic Dictionary contains 131,257 words.

The number, as we see, is accurate, but the answer to the question posed is not that inaccurate or incomplete - it is conditional and requires too many reservations that can change this number by an order of magnitude. Thus, the indicated quantity can “grow” if we count adverbs with -о, -е, formed from qualitative adjectives, like frankly(from frank), silently(from silent), - they are listed in the dictionary not as independent units, but in articles with the original adjectives.

But these are still, so to speak, flowers... As the name of the dictionary itself indicates, it includes only words of a literary, that is, standardized, language. Meanwhile, the national Russian language is rich in a huge number of dialect words, such as Vologda, that are still used in rural areas and are not fully taken into account by any dictionary. screw up in meaning search or noun flow(bird), found in Vyatka villages, etc. Of course, the enormous wealth of dialect vocabulary (but again, far from exhaustive!) was reflected in Dahl’s dictionary, compiled in the century before last. In total, it contains more than 200 thousand vocabulary units. There are also modern dictionaries of Russian dialects published in one area or another.

However, if dialectisms are not characteristic of a literary language (with the exception of artistic speech), then it very often uses words of a different type, which you also will not find in general explanatory dictionaries, even the most complete ones. These are terms, proper names, neologisms and some other categories of words. Let’s take a common newspaper phrase: “This unique textbook on computer optics was created by a team of employees from the Institute of Image Processing Systems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by a famous scientist.” Here all the words are generally understandable and commonly used. However, the Big Academic Dictionary does not contain the abbreviation RAS(linguists today recognize abbreviations as independent words, separate from the decoding; by the way, there are special dictionaries of abbreviated words), as well as an adjective computer, which, however, like the original noun computer, simply could not get into the dictionary created about half a century ago. New words that have appeared in the Russian language over the past decades, especially associated with the rapid changes in social life of the 90s, should have been reflected in the 2nd edition of the Great Academic Dictionary in 20 volumes. But... after the 4th volume, published in 1993, the matter died out.

A special area of vocabulary is terminology - the designation of scientific and technical concepts. They are known and used only among specialists in one or another scientific and technical field. It is unlikely that anyone is familiar with, for example, words such as Zignella- type of algae (bot.), izafet- type of phrases in some languages (linguistic), etc. In principle, one person cannot know all the terms used in our language - due to their enormous number. Each science and technical branch has developed its own terminology, sometimes consisting of tens of thousands of units. Imagine, for example, how many of them are contained in a multi-volume medical encyclopedia!

Proper nouns constitute such a lexical layer of the national language (bearing a special name - “onomastics”), which, apparently, cannot be even approximately quantified. In fact, how many, say, cities and villages, rivers and lakes, localities and mountains are there in the Russian Federation? Well-known, as in any other country, are the names of more or less large geographical objects (Volga, Ural, Paris, Seine) - they form only a small percentage of all toponymy. The lion's share consists of toponyms used by local residents in a limited area, where often a ravine or stream, a hillock or a grove have their own name. For example, in the Samara region there is a village Silent people. If residents use " I was in Molgachi", "I am from Molgachi", which means it is part of the Russian language, regardless of its origin! And how many space objects have their own names - so-called astronyms!

There is one more significant remark. In linguistics, there is generally no precise and comprehensive definition of what a word is. It is not linguists who are “to blame” for this, but the extreme complexity of such a phenomenon as language. Simple example: go And walking- two words or variations of one? Also: house And little house? The issue is not so easy to resolve. After all, if we consider all participles as separate words ( walking), gerunds, forms of subjective assessment ( little house) and other formations and include them in the dictionary, it can swell so much that one copy of it will not fit, perhaps, in a medium-sized room. Exaggeration? Then try to estimate for yourself the number of so-called potential words, which are not stable units of language, but appear in speech out of necessity and at the same time are very similar in appearance to those that we usually use. These, in particular, include complex adjectives with the first component - a numeral. For example: two-ruble, twelve-ruble, one-day, thirty-day, six hundred eighty-five kilometer etc. My computer underlined the last two words as non-existent(?!). Let's experiment further: one-legged, two-legged, three-legged, four-legged, five-legged... The computer confidently underlined the penultimate word, and “hesitatingly”, and the last one. How many such words can, in principle, appear in speech? And how many of them were actually used over the past two centuries - is this approximately how the age of the modern Russian language is estimated? Should I include them all in the dictionary or not? Only a few of these formations are recorded in the Big Academic Dictionary.

It is impossible to count all the words of a particular living language because it does not remain unchanged for a single day. Some words or their individual meanings go out of use, new ones appear, and it is, of course, impossible to record each such fact, since this process is gradual and, as a rule, elusive.

So, if we talk about some specific, limited “section” of the language, then a more or less exact number of words is known: the number of the most common in different styles and genres has already been named - about 40 thousand (according to the “Frequency Dictionary of the Russian Language” under edited by L. N. Zasorina (Moscow, 1977). You can also mention, for example, the number of the most commonly used abbreviations - about 18 thousand (see: Alekseev D.I. et al. “Dictionary of abbreviations of the Russian language.” M., 1983). Against the background of data on the lexical wealth of the entire national language, the volume of a personal vocabulary, or, as linguists say, the volume of an active vocabulary, that is, the number of words used by one person, is of interest. For an educated “mere mortal” it is estimated at an average of 5-10 thousand words.

Perhaps not a single academician will answer your question exactly how many words there are in the Russian language. It’s just that no one has yet been able to accurately count them, because the living Russian language contains not only literary norms, but is also replete with dialectisms, professionalisms and jargon. The language is constantly evolving, replenished with more and more new words and forms. But a rough estimate can still be made...

In addition, scientists differ on the calculation methodology. For example, in the UK it is customary to include absolutely everything in reference books such as the Oxford or Webster Dictionaries. There you can even find articles on symbols (including the designation of chemical elements, abbreviations for weights, lengths and other physical quantities, paper formats, etc.) and special terms (for example, “WEB 2.0” is a separate article!). In the Russian scientific tradition, only full-fledged linguistic units of the literary language are included in dictionaries.

The most authoritative domestic publication by which one can judge the capacity of the language is the Great Academic Dictionary, the first edition of which was published back in the Soviet years. It contains 131,257 words of the Russian literary language. Work is currently underway on a new edition of this reference book, which will contain about 150,000 words. The pre-revolutionary dictionary of V.I. Dahl contains more than 200,000 words.

According to professional linguists, if you add dialectisms to this, you will get more than 400,000 words. If we also take into account professional terms, informal units and new formations, then the number of words will exceed half a million!

Language is a living system. Some words “die”, going out of use completely or remaining only in literary works. But new ones are taking their place. For example, in the 20th and early 21st centuries, the Russian language was enriched by at least 40 words with only the root “love”: “book lover”, “nature lover”, “monogamous”, “love-game”, “love-hate”, “love” -carrots”, “lovelessness” and others. New trends bring new words into our lives, which are formed either on the basis of already existing Russian linguistic units, or through the Russification of foreign borrowings: “post”, “smiley”, “okeyushki”, “like”, etc.

But counting borrowings in any language is a completely thankless task. Throughout the history of mankind, most languages have undergone (and are still subject to) very significant mutual influence. The Russian language has a huge number of borrowings from Scandinavian, Baltic, Turkic, Arabic, European languages and dialects, and, of course, from Latin and Greek. Some words were borrowed so long ago that they are perceived as originally Russian. Meanwhile, even “village”, “boyar”, “jug”, “chest”, “whip”, “sugar”, “beets”, “lantern”, “cart”, “steering wheel”, “boot” and many -many others are borrowings from other languages.

The English language, from which today the greatest flow of borrowings into other languages comes, is also not a standard of purity. In Webster's Dictionary, only 35% are native English words, the remaining 65% is borrowing.

It is not entirely correct to talk about the “poverty” or “richness” of any common language. For example, English and Russian languages are generally comparable in terms of the number of words (linguists estimate the real capacity of the English language at approximately 470 thousand words). The only question is their applicability and frequency of use, as well as size vocabulary the average native speaker.

In the Russian language, according to the “Frequency Dictionary of the Russian Language” edited by L. N. Zasorina, about 30 thousand words are the most common, and just over 6 thousand words have the highest frequency. And the most common ones in everyday speech are about 2,500 thousand.

The lexicon of the classic of Russian literature A.S. Pushkin had approximately 21 thousand words (that’s how many were counted in his works, including not only the main lexemes, but also their derivatives: leaf-leaf-leaf, etc.). Lexicon ordinary person assessed differently. There is no unity in the calculation methodology and results. There is conflicting evidence that a school leaver's vocabulary ranges from 3,000 to 40,000 words. And a person with higher education– from 7,000 to 80,000 words. When making such calculations, it must be taken into account that vocabulary is divided into active and passive. The active stock consists of those words whose meaning a person understands and uses in speech, and the passive stock consists of those that he understands, but does not use in practice.

You yourself can take one of the tests to determine passive vocabulary using this link http://www.myvocab.info/ For the purity of the experiment, we recommend doing this a couple of times. Write about your results in the comments to the post.

P.S. If you have interesting materials, references, tips, life hacks on absolutely any topic, then send them to the project email #Educational program This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

How many words are there in Russian?

The number, as we see, is accurate, but the answer to the question posed is not that inaccurate or incomplete - it is conditional and requires too many reservations that can change this number by an order of magnitude. Thus, the indicated quantity can “grow” if we count adverbs in -O, -e, formed from qualitative adjectives, like frankly(from frank), silently(from silent), - they are listed in the dictionary not as independent units, but in articles with the original adjectives.

But these are still, so to speak, flowers... As the name of the dictionary itself indicates, it includes only the words literary, that is, a standardized language. Meanwhile, the national Russian language is rich in a huge number of dialect words, such as Vologda, that are still used in rural areas and are not fully taken into account by any dictionary. screw up in meaning search or noun flow(bird), found in Vyatka villages, etc. Of course, the enormous wealth of dialect vocabulary (but again, far from exhaustive!) was reflected in Dahl’s dictionary, compiled in the century before last. In total, it contains more than 200 thousand vocabulary units. There are also modern dictionaries of Russian dialects published in one area or another.

A miniature from the Radziwill Chronicle (XIII century), which depicts the creators of the alphabet, Cyril and Methodius.

A special area of vocabulary is terminology - the designation of scientific and technical concepts. They are known and used only among specialists in one or another scientific and technical field. It is unlikely that anyone is familiar with, for example, words such as zignella - type of algae (bot.), izafet - type of phrases in some languages (linguistic), etc. All In principle, one person cannot know the terms used in our language - due to their enormous number. Each science and technical branch has developed its own terminology, sometimes consisting of tens of thousands of units. Imagine, for example, how many of them are contained in a multi-volume medical encyclopedia!

"Primer" by Karion Istomin. Copper engraving by L. Bunin (1694).

Proper nouns constitute such a lexical layer of the national language (bearing a special name - “onomastics”), which, apparently, cannot be even approximately quantified. In fact, how many, say, cities and villages, rivers and lakes, localities and mountains are there in the Russian Federation? Well-known, as in any other country, are the names of more or less large geographical objects (Volga, Ural, Paris, Seine) - they form only a small percentage of all toponymy. The lion's share consists of toponyms used by local residents in a limited area, where often a ravine or stream, a hillock or a grove have their own name. For example, in the Samara region there is a village Silent people. If residents use " I was in Molgachi", "I am from Molgachi", which means it is part of the Russian language, regardless of its origin! And how many space objects have their own names - so-called astronyms!

There is one more significant remark. In linguistics, there is generally no precise and comprehensive definition of what a word is. It is not linguists who are “to blame” for this, but the extreme complexity of such a phenomenon as language. Simple example: go And walking- two words or variations of one? Also: house And little house? The issue is not so easy to resolve. After all, if we consider all participles as separate words ( walking), gerunds, forms of subjective assessment ( little house) and other formations and include them in the dictionary, it can swell so much that one copy of it will not fit, perhaps, in a medium-sized room. Exaggeration? Then try to estimate for yourself the number of so-called potential words, which are not stable units of language, but appear in speech out of necessity and at the same time are very similar in appearance to those that we usually use. These, in particular, include complex adjectives with the first component - a numeral. For example: two-ruble, twelve-ruble, one-day, thirty-day, six hundred eighty-five kilometer etc. My computer underlined the last two words as non-existent(?!). Let's experiment further: one-legged, two-legged, three-legged, four-legged, five-legged... The computer confidently underlined the penultimate word, and “hesitatingly”, and the last one. How many such words can, in principle, appear in speech? And how many of them were actually consumed over the last two centuries - this is approximately how age is estimated modern Russian language? Should I include them all in the dictionary or not? Only a few of these formations are recorded in the Big Academic Dictionary.

The first secular engraving appeared in V. F. Burtsev's "ABC" (1637). At the top left is the inscription: "school".