其实英语中有多少单词的问题并不复杂，但是又很多的朋友都不太了解英语中有多少单词，因此呢，今天小编就来为大家分享英语中有多少单词的一些知识，希望可以帮助到大家，下面我们一起来看看这个问题的分析吧！

How many words are there in the English language?

英语中有多少单词？

你可以选择一边读文章，一边听边肖的朗读：

There is no single sensible answer to this question. It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually counts as a word. Is dogone word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (e.g. dogs=plural noun, dogs=present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog?

这个问题几乎没有合理的答案。计算一门语言的字数几乎是不可能的，因为很难定义什么是单词。比如dogone是一个字还是两个字？因为dogone，作为一个名词，意味着一种动物，

作为动词，意思是紧紧跟随。如果这种情况算作两个字，是不是意味着不同的异体字也算作不同的字？例如，dogs既可以用作名词dog的复数形式，也可以用作动词dog的第三人称单数形式。

狗累是一个词还是两个词连在一起？热狗真的是两个字吗？你知道，热狗也可以写热狗，甚至热狗。

It's also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Teenage slang? Abbreviations?

如果很难界定一个词是一个词还是几个词，那么有些词是不是英语词也很难界定。比如医学或者科学术语算不算英语单词？法律中的拉丁词，烹饪中的法语词，学术写作中的德语词，

武侠里的日语单词算不算英语单词？苏格兰方言算不算英语？青少年说的俚语算英语吗？缩写算不算英语？

The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don't take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).

第二版《牛津英语词典》共20卷，在用字171476个，弃用字47.156个。在此基础上，约有9.500个派生词，作为小类收入词典。

这些词中大约一半是名词，大约四分之一是形容词，大约七分之一是动词，其余的包括感叹词、连词、介词和后缀。而且这些数字还不包括用来分类不同词的词，比如名词和正确。

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

这意味着英语中至少有250，000个完全不同的单词，这还不包括单词变体、未被词典收录的技术或地区单词，以及未被已出版的词典收录的单词。在这些词中，

目前大概有20%已经不用了。如果把词的不同含义也算作不同的词，那么英语的总字数将高达75万。

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