How many words are there in English?

English is a complex language, with perhaps a quarter million words in use. This doesn't even count different forms of the word (harps, harped, harping) or different meanings of the same word (harp, a stringed instrument and harp, to nag). If you counted all of those along with words that are now obsolete, the number of English words would run closer to three quarters of a million. Even with the smaller number, English is at the top of the language list for numbers of words.

The primary reason for this is that English is a rich and complex language, pulling from many sources. Unlike the French, English-speakers have eagerly sought out the riches of other languages. A favorite quote of mine explains this colorfully:

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words. On occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” James Nicholl

While English is a Germanic language, English words come from many sources; 28% comes from the French, another 28% from Latin, 25% from Germanic (Old and Middle English), 4% have unknown ancestry, 3% are derived from proper names, and less than 1% comes from other languages. Although there are fewer of them, the majority of the words we use everyday come from the Germanic.

What this means is that we can have several words meaning the same thing. Instead of one root, we often have four, giving us words with shades and subtleties of meaning. Take words dealing with birth. The word birth itself comes from the Old Norse byrth and refers specifically to the bringing forth of a new individual from the body of its parent. It is perhaps the most common root in English use for birth words.

But then we have the Latin root nascor, to be born, and all the words derived from that. Forms of this word often have nasc, nat, or gna as their root. Pregnancy is an example; pre-, before, and gna, to be born. Your natal day is your birthday, and things that are innate are inborn. Nativity refers to the process or circumstance of being born, and you are a native of the place where you were born. Nature also has the same root, referring to the inborn characteristics of a person. Nascent, as in a nascent industry, means newly come into existence.

A second group of words is centered around the Greek root genos, meaning birth, race or kind. To generate means to bring into existence. A generation is a group of individuals born and living at the same time; the same word can also mean the action of producing offspring. Genesis, the first book of the Torah and Bible which tells the story of creation, means just that: the origin or coming into being of something. Even generous is related; in its genesis, it meant highborn.

A third group revolves around the Germanic root kin. Kindergarten is a class for the teaching of children or kinders. Your kin or kinsmen are your relatives, as are your kindred, which can be both a noun or an adjective. Another Germanic root is the Old English beran, to bear, to bring forth, produce. We get the word born from this root. Interestingly, ball bearings are also related; they bear the friction and is one of several words that retain the notion of moving onward by pressure.

This is one reason why it is so important to teach reading using a systematic and sequential phonetic approach; there are simply too many words to teach each word individually. There are too many different syllables to use a syllabary as Sequoyah did. If a struggling reader hopes to improve, he must be given the tools to sound out unfamiliar words. And although our language is a hodgepodge of other languages, surprisingly over 85% of English can be sounded out using those tools.