by 
camjam
ANSWERS: 5
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Actually believe it or not this is one of those questions that does not have a correct, or at least accurate, answer. According to experts, the number of words is changing every minute of the day. Because english is the most common language on the internet, non-english speaking people are creating words for their internet site. I did find a website that attempts to keep an accurate number of english words. According to Global Language Monitor... http://www.languagemonitor.com/default.php (scroll to the bottom of the page) As of February 17, 2005 at 12:40 p.m. there were approximately 849,410 words in the English Language "plus or minus a handful"
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Are mouse, mice, mousy, and mouselike separate words or just forms of one root word? Is a computer mouse the same word as the rodent? (To demonstrate the difficulty in counting words, over the centuries many scholars have attempted to count how many different words Shakespeare used in his corpus of work. The counts run anywhere from 16,000 to 30,000
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As one other writer said, it is impossible to answer this partly because the language is constantly changing. It is expected that the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary may define over one million terms, but some of these are multi-word phrases, however there are a lot of scientific and technical terms (e.g. names of chemicals) the OED does not define. Are these strictly speaking English? It is generally belived among lexicographers that English has more words that any other language. This is partly because of its profligate borrowing of terms and phrases from other languages.
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Too many to count
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G'day camjam, Thank you for your question. No-one really knows as it is growing all the time. The Oxford English Dictionary estimates 600,000 words while some websites estimate that there could be close to a million. http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/06/a-million-english-words-give-or-take-half-a-million/ Regards
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