The wonder of the English language
According to the Global Language Monitor on this day at this time the English vocabulary will acquire its one millionth word. It’s nonsense of course – nobody knows how many words there are today in the English language and this particular organisation has forecast on several occasions that different dates will see the arrival of the one millionth word.
But the English vocabulary is huge and growing and English is now a truly global language, so it’s fascinating to use this occasion to look at a few facts about English:
- English has twice as many words as Cantonese – the world’s second largest language vocabulary
- By comparison, Spanish has about 250,000 words and French around 100,000
- Some 80% of the words in the English language relate to science and technology
- The average English speaker only uses about 14,000 words – or 1.4% of the total if we accept the 1M figure
- The most linguistically gifted English speakers are only believed to use around 70,000 words
- The highest scoring word in Scrabble is ‘quartzy’ which scores 164 if played across a red triple word square with the ‘z’ on a light blue double letter square
These facts are taken from an article in the “Daily Mirror” newspaper published a month ago.
The same article tells us that, when Shakespeare was writing his famous plays, there were just two million English speakers and fewer than 100,000 words. Today there are estimated to be 1.53 billion English speakers and, as mentioned earlier, possibly as many as 1M words. So how did English become such a global language? The process is explained in this book and explored in this one.
According to the paper version of the “Daily Mirror” article (the information is not in the online version), the two most used words in the English language are ‘the’ and ‘of’. Interestingly, in the nearest that I have to a second language (Czech), these words do not exist.
June 10th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
There are numerous Language Log posts about Global Language Monitor. Here’s an entertaining recent one: The “million word” hoax rolls along.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:44 am
Hi Roger,
It’s an interesting article.
It’s a shame that we don’t do more for the Portuguese language like the English have done.
Best regards,
José