Quote:
Originally Posted by plib
To my knowledge there isn't any definitive tome on the size the English vocabulary compared to other languages.
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I read a journal rticle recently which estimated that English had something like 700,000 "root words" in its vocabulary, compared with an estimated 120,000 in French, and 150,000 in German. As you say, though, it's the kind of thing that's very difficult to quantify.
In everyday life, most people use fewer than 2,000 different words.