Does anyone know all of the words in the English language?

No.

I’m currently working on a large copyediting project, plus a separate proofread, for a publisher, and the cumulative word count is over 300,000 words. That’s similar in length to Bleak House, Anna Karenina, or – to look at it another way – reading The Great Gatsby seven times back to back (which was pretty much what we had to do in school, right?). And it’s got me thinking about the number of words that exist in the English language.

On holiday earlier this year (I think while sat trying to cool down in a café away from the meltingly hot Istanbul temperatures), a friend told me that there are around 170,000 words¹ in current use in English (plus, according to an estimate from the Oxford English Dictionary from a few years ago, there are nearly 50,000 more that are obsolete). So, combined, that’s fewer words than the number I’m currently processing through my copyediting/proofreading brain. Of course, the words in the manuscripts I’m working on are not all different words, but it’s been an interesting way to visualise what it would be like to learn all of the words that exist in English.

Last night, while I was cooking (I was actually just reheating some leftovers – a sounded-amazing-but-wasn’t-that-great cauliflower dish I made loads of and have now had to eat for the last four meals), I was listening to the Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4. It was a special edition from the Cheltenham Science Festival with an audience of children. The kids were asking some brilliant questions, in the way that kids do, including: ‘Why don’t dogs sweat like us?², ‘Will advances in AI mean that in the future we’ll be able to communicate more with animals?’, and ‘If birds have backwards-facing knees can they jump further backwards than forwards?’.³

Then, this evening, my mind was in questioning mode, and without Robin Ince⁴ and Brian Cox there to ask, I googled the question that I’d been wondering about during my work this week: Does anyone know all the words in the English language?

It’s rare that you get a definitive ‘nope’ from googling something. But that’s what happened. The answers that flashed up included:

There is just no way

Not a possibility

And, on the BBC News website no less: ain't nobody got time for that.

I was really disappointed! I think the spirit of the Olympics had primed me to expect a ‘Yes! This awesome word-athlete won gold in the word-learning race’.

Apparently ‘most people’ know ‘only’ around 20,000 words, but surely it must vary so much from person to person? The BBC article did give a path to starting to understand how many words we, as individuals, might know:

Linguists Paul Nation and John Read (who doesn't love a bit of nominative determinism?), along with their colleague Robin Goulden, came up with a test involving only 50 words.

Their theory is that if you count up how many of the 50 words you understand and multiply the total by 500 you are able to estimate your total English vocabulary.

The test they devised is available at: https://my.vocabularysize.com/

So … here’s your invitation to try it! I’ve not yet done it myself, having just discovered it and now heading out the door to get some dinner out (sorry cauli),⁵ but I’ll give it a go this week and report back. Let me know if you try it and whether it surprises you or not.

1. Specifically, these are headwords, which are words that begin a separate entry in a dictionary. I think (from some cursory googling) that the count of all words (those variations listed under the headwords) is closer to a million.

2. They sweat from their paws! What?!

3. Apparently, that bit that looks like a knee on a bird is an ankle! But bats actually do have backward-facing knees (and are not good at jumping).

4. Robin Ince was, in fact, the keynote speaker at last year’s Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading conference. He read to us from the Moomins! (absolute heart eyes!) And he talked about starting your day magnificently (rather than doom-scrolling) which I’ve tried, with some success, since.

5. I actually love cauliflower, it’s one of my favourites, just this particular recipe (or, more likely, the way I made it, was not the best). I’m not going to shame the recipe, because everything else in that particular cookbook is amazing, but I’m certainly looking forward to something different tonight.