How Many Words Are in the English Language?

It sounds like a simple question with a single number for an answer. It is not. Ask three dictionaries and you will get three different numbers — and all three can be right, because the answer depends entirely on how you count.

Here is the short answer first, then the full story behind it.

The Short Answer: About 600,000 Words

The Oxford English Dictionary — the biggest dictionary of English ever made — lists over 600,000 words. Of those, about 170,000 words are in current use today; the rest are old words that have fallen out of everyday speech, words from older forms of English, and words that only appear in specialist books.

Other dictionaries count differently, which is why their numbers look smaller:

Dictionary	Words listed
Oxford English Dictionary	Over 600,000
Webster’s Third New International	Around 470,000
A typical desk dictionary	100,000–200,000

None of these is wrong. They are just counting different things, and the difference is in the rules they use.

Why Dictionaries Disagree: It Depends How You Count

1. Do you count every form of a word? The words “run”, “runs”, “running” and “ran” are one word or four, depending on your rule. Some dictionaries count them as one entry; a strict counter counts four.

2. Do you count compounds? “Bookshelf”, “sunflower” and “keyboard” are made from two words each. Count them separately and the total grows by thousands.

3. Do you count technical words? Medicine, law, science and computing each add thousands of specialist words that most people never use. The word “deoxyribonucleic” is a real English word, but it does not belong in a count of everyday language.

4. Do you count slang and new words? English gains new words every year — the Oxford English Dictionary adds new entries four times a year, in quarterly updates. Words like “selfie” and “unfriend” did not exist a generation ago, and they are in the dictionary now.

Change any one of these rules and the total moves by tens of thousands. That is why “how many words are in English” has no single true number — only numbers with a counting rule attached.

How Many Words Do You Actually Know?

Here is the number that matters more than the dictionary total: the number of words in your own head.

An educated native English speaker knows about 17,000 word families — roughly 20,000 individual words, once you count the different forms. A “word family” is a base word plus its forms: “happy”, “happily”, “happiness” and “unhappy” are one family, not four words.

Shakespeare used roughly 30,000 different words across all his plays and poems — far more than most people use in a lifetime, and still only a small slice of the dictionary’s 600,000.

A learner of English needs far fewer than you think. Research on vocabulary (by the linguist Paul Nation) shows that about 3,000 word families cover roughly 95% of everyday conversation, and about 8,000–9,000 word families cover roughly 98% of written text. That is why a learner with 3,000 words can hold a conversation, while a native speaker with 17,000 can read almost anything.

The gap between 17,000 and 600,000 is the point: nobody knows all the words in English. Not even close. The dictionary is a record of the whole language; a person’s vocabulary is the small part of it they actually use.

How English Compares With Other Languages

By dictionary size, English is one of the largest languages in the world — partly because it has borrowed words from everywhere. A large French dictionary lists around 80,000 words, and German builds enormous compound words out of small parts, so its count depends even more on the counting rule than English does.

But size is not the same as usefulness. What makes English powerful is not that it has 600,000 words — it is that its most common 3,000 words do almost all the everyday work. The rest sit in the dictionary, waiting for the rare moment they are needed.

How to Count the Words in Your Own Writing

The same counting question comes up in everyday writing, and there the answer is exact: a word counter counts every word you typed, one by one.

• A typical novel is 80,000–100,000 words long.
• A school essay is usually 500–1,000 words.
• A university essay is often 1,500–2,500 words.

If you are writing an essay, a report or a story and you need to hit a word limit, do not guess — count it. Our free Word Counter counts your words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type, and tells you your reading time too. And if you are wondering how long your piece is in paragraphs rather than words, our guide on how many words are in a paragraph breaks that down as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many words are in the English language?
The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 600,000 words, of which about 170,000 are in current use. The number depends on the counting rule — different dictionaries give different totals.

How many words does the average person know?
An educated native English speaker knows about 17,000 word families, roughly 20,000 individual words. Most of those are words they recognise; the words they actually use every day number far fewer.

How many words do you need to speak English?
About 3,000 word families cover roughly 95% of everyday conversation, and about 8,000–9,000 cover roughly 98% of written text. You do not need anywhere near the full dictionary to speak English well.

How many words did Shakespeare use?
Roughly 30,000 different words across all his plays and poems — far more than most people use, and still only a small part of the dictionary.

Is English still growing?
Yes. The Oxford English Dictionary adds new words four times a year, and thousands of new words enter the language every decade — mostly from technology, science and everyday slang.

The Real Answer

So, how many words are in the English language? If you want one number, say 600,000 — that is the Oxford English Dictionary’s count. But the honest answer is: it depends how you count, and the number you actually live with is much smaller — about 17,000 words in your head, 3,000 of them doing almost all the work. Paste your next essay into our free Word Counter and find out how many of those words you just used.