English

Vocabulary

Fun Facts & FAQs:

2

............How many English words are there?! 3

.........Which language has the most words?! 3

....................What is a logoraphic language?! 4

..How big is the Oxford English Dictionary?! 4

..............................................What is a word?! 4

.......Is English the best common language?! 5

.................Vocabulary of English speakers?! 6

1. ..............................................Irregular verbs 6

.........................Are irregular verbs ʻfossilsʼ?! 7

............................How many irregular verbs?! 8

................How do you learn irregular verbs?! 9

...........Are there now fewer irregular verbs?! 9

.............................................New Irregulars?! 10

http://englishlanguage.eslreading.org/ http://esolebooks.com/

How many English words are there?

'June 9, 2009 is the day when the English language reaches one million words!'

This claim by an American media company came from a

computer analysis of various dictionaries. It was immediately

described by the English linguist, David Crystal as the ‘biggest

load of rubbish I've heard in years.’

Professor Crystal is perhaps the leading expert on the

English language and wrote the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2003). ‘The English language passed a

million words years ago,’ he insists, suggesting that the mistake

comes from computers counting words rather than lexemes.

So how many words are there in English? How do we count

them? And how does the English lexicon compare with other

languages?

Which language has the most words?

There is no certain answer to this because we often define

‘language’ and ‘word’ in different ways. Chinese, for example, is

a single language in terms of its written form. In the spoken

form, however, it is a family of languages or dialects.

Spoken Mandarin is as distinct from Cantonese as Spanish

is from Portuguese.

4

What is a logoraphic language?

Different languages also use different writing systems. English

is alphabetic; Chinese is logographic.

✦ An alphabetic language has letters, which help guide

pronunciation.

✦ A logographic language separates the written and spoken

forms. Chinese characters do not guide pronunciation.

Despite these differences, we can get a sense of differences in

language size is by comparing dictionaries.

How big is the Oxford English Dictionary?

The OED defines 615,100 words.

✦ A similar German dictionary offers around 180,000

words.

✦ A Russian language dictionary has around 160,000

words

✦ A French edition has less than 150,000.

This suggests English probably has the biggest vocabulary of

all the European languages.

What is a word?

This is a surprisingly complex question. For example the OED

distinguishes 430 senses for the verb set. Is each form of set a

separate word? Linguists make the distinction between words

5

and lexemes. The lexeme ‘run’, for example, includes all its

forms: run, running, ran etc.

And what about numbers? If you count to a million, do you

have a million words?

Are all the words in OED in use?

✦ 41,700 OED words are obsolete. This means that you are unlikely to use them.

✦ 240 are ghost words. A ghost word has never existed outside dictionaries.

Is English the best common language?

Many complain that English is ‘difficult’, pointing to its heavy

use of phrasal verbs and odd phonological quirks. For over a

century there have been attempts to promote an alternate

lingua franc (see here.) But the linguist Richard Lederer

describes English as the most 'democratic' language in history.

By this he means that the users of English help change

and improve it. This is possible because of "the relative

simplicity of its grammar and syntax.” English has other

advantages in that it:

✦ easily imports words from other languages, cultures and

traditions.

✦ has no academy to decide which words are acceptable.

6

Vocabulary of English speakers?

There are different opinions on this question.

✦ Lederer has suggested that a typical English speaker has a

vocabulary of between 10,000 and 20,000 words.

✦ Steven Pinker talks of 60,000 ‘by high school’.

We also need to distinguish between our passive and active

language. Passive language consists of those words we recognise

but perhaps do not say or write. Our active vocabulary is those

word we use in speech and writing.

Irregular verbsMost English verbs follow a simple

pattern. ‘I paint’ becomes ‘I

painted/I have painted’ and so on.

Irregular verbs do not follow this

or any other rule. ‘I see’ for example,

becomes ‘I saw/I have seen’.

This lack of pattern makes irregular verbs more difficult

to learn. According to the linguist, Noam Chomsky, we are

born with a ‘universal grammar’: an inherited capacity to learn

languages.

7

Small children, for example, learn to speak and

understand at an incredible speed. Imitation plays some part in

this but is not enough to explain a seemingly intuitive mastery

of complex grammatical rules.

This in-built logic makes children instinctively assume

that all verbs are regular. That’s why a child might say ‘buyed’

instead of ‘bought’ for example.

Language students also struggle with strange irregular

verb endings. Why does 'go' become ‘went’? Or ‘get’ turn into

‘got’? Irregulars can seem like traps set up to make life difficult!

To confuse things further, some verb endings are the

same in the past and present. The book you read today is the

same as the one you read yesterday.

So why does English have these illogical, infuriating

words? And why are they so important?

Are irregular verbs ‘fossils’?

English borrows words from many languages - particularly

Latin, French and Greek. Is this imported vocabulary the

source of the irregularity?

Perhaps surprisingly all the ‘foreign’ verbs are regular. Latin

had a big influence on the English lexicon (see here) but not

on the grammatical structure of the language.

8

Steven Pinker suggest an interesting theory in his Words and Rules (1999). He argues that irregular verbs fossils of an

Indo-European language that disappeared many thousands of

years ago.

According to this theory, the Indo-Europeans wandered

across Europe and southwest Asia. They spoke language with a

regular rule in which one vowel replaced another.

Over time pronunciation changed. The ‘rules became

opaque to children and eventually died; the irregular past tense

forms are their fossils.’

They are ‘fossils’ of an Indo-European prehistoric

language.

How many irregular verbs?

There are now around 180 irregular verbs in English.

That may sound a lot – but it is a

small fraction of the thousands of

regular verbs. But irregular verbs

are heavily used. They make up:

✦ 70% of all the verbs we use

✦ The ten verbs we use most often: be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get.

9

How do you learn irregular verbs?

We need to work hard to memorise an irregular verb. It takes

children years to learn to use ‘spoke’ and not speaked. Some

never learn that nobody ever ‘writ’ anything.

Many of the grammatical mistakes commonly made by

native speakers – we was, they done etc – involve irregular

verbs.

And yet children have a remarkable capacity to

memorise new words. They learn a new one every two hours

and know an average 60,000 by the age of 13. You can find a short video about the best approach to learning irregular verbs here.

Are there now fewer irregular verbs?

The number of commonly used irregular verbs is declining.

Some die of natural causes. Most modern children don’t know

the word cleave or that its past is clove. Nor are they likely to

come across abide/abode.

Other irregulars like dream and learn are gradually

becoming regular. How long can dreamt survive alongside

dreamed?

As English becomes ever more international, the simpler

verb forms become more dominant.

Despite this there is no danger of irregular verbs

disappearing. Even before they learn to read most children can

10

use 80 irregulars. They may not realise that the word ‘went’

originally came from ‘wend’ but nobody over the age of six

seriously tries to replace it with ‘goed’.

New Irregulars?

The future is less promising for new irregular verbs. All new

verbs in English are regular, including all new noun

conversions: I accessed, you emailed.

Even when an old verb takes a new meaning it uses a

regular pattern – the army officer rung his general but his men

ringed the city.

For a new irregular verb to survive it must offer some

familiar pattern in how it works. One of the most recent

irregulars is sneak/snuck, which you find in American English.

In Britain we prefer sneaked but snuck is also logical

because it follows the pattern of strike/struck.

© 2010 Kieran McGovern

Comprehension exercises, audio, quizzes, crosswords, a glossary & other learning activities here:

Where do English words come from?

Blog: http://thisinterestedme.blogspot.com/The English Language: http://englishlanguage.eslreading.org/ESOL ebooks: http://esolebooks.com/index.htmlEmail: kieran@eslreading.org