Quote:
Originally Posted by Billi
But English has quite the opposite reputation: it is said to be one of the most economic languages in the world as it has - comparably - few grammar rules and also uses only - relatively - few words as many of its words have many (different) meanings. I would have thought that e.g. French and German had far more words.
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You can have a working knowledge of English with a surprisingly small vocabulary (say, 2,000 words).
But English has accumulated a very large number of words. The OED, the closest thing to an authority in English, reckons there are about 175,000 words in current use. (Although other sources, using different definitions of what counts as a word, have said that there's over a million!)
Apparently, the Scrabble list for up to nine letter words has 160,000 words.
http://testyourvocab.com/ is a fun web site. I suspect that their definition is word is close the the OED's, which indicates that the average (middle aged and older) participant in their survey knows about one fifth of the total available English vocabulary!
Of course, this explains why a programme like
Call My Bluff could have worked.