[Ti] English & French word Counts

[Bill Palmer]

b wrote:

> Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged checks in 
> with 450,000 words. That's a lot.
>
> Meanwhile, Harper Collins Robert French Unabridged dictionary weighs 
> in with definitions for a little over 820,000 words. 

Actually, it has "over 850,000 entries and translations" - it's a 
French-English/English-French dictionary, and by my reading of the table 
of contents, slightly more than half of the pages are devoted to the 
English-French section.  Looking at the sample pages on Amazon.com, and 
assuming words are distributed relatively uniformly over the 1000 pages 
each half of the dictionary occupies, we need to see about 400 entries 
per page.  The only way I see that as possible is if each different 
usage is counted as a different entry.  Perhaps that's the standard way 
to count dictionary entries, but without confirmation that everyone is 
counting the same way (and see below for some illustration of why that 
is problematic), it isn't convincing as a means of comparison for which 
dictionary has more items, much less which language has more words.

> Moral: if you're going to be an ethno, or geo-centric gringo, get yer 
> friggin' facts straight. 

One guy's fact is another guy's opinion.  It's pretty difficult to get a 
consistent basis for comparison between two languages, especially with 
languages where there is no official body acting as arbiter of what is 
and is not part of the language.

However, the "ethno, or geo-centric gringos" at the Oxford University 
Press have the following to say on the question at hand:

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/mostwords


    Is it true that English has the most words of any language?

This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons set 
out in the answer to How many words are there in the English language? 
<http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/numberwords> 
However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most 
comparable world languages. The reason for this is historical. English 
was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it 
shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. 
However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by 
Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a 
considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship 
and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered 
the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than 
either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language 
family to which French belongs. English is also very ready to 
accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international 
language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other 
sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore `agglutinative' 
languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long 
strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost 
infinite number of `words'.