牛津詞典給你科普 英語裏一共有多少單詞
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 dog one 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?
這個問題並沒有一個簡單而合理的答案。想要計算一種語言裏有多少單詞是不可能做到的，因爲很難定義究竟什麼纔是一個單詞。Dog究竟算一個單詞還是兩個(名詞指一種動物，動詞指長期跟隨)？如果算作兩個，那麼我們是否也要把它的變型也單獨計算(例如：複數名詞dogs，第三人稱單數現在時dogs)？Dog-tired(筋疲力盡)算一個單詞還是兩個連在一起的單詞？既然Hot dog(熱狗)可以被寫成hot-dog甚至hotdog，它真的算兩個單詞嗎？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?
同樣，很難定義什麼纔算英語。醫學和科學名詞怎麼辦？法律中使用的拉丁詞彙、烹飪中使用的法語詞彙、學術寫作中使用的德語詞彙和武術中使用的日語詞彙怎麼辦？蘇格蘭方言算不算？青少年的俚語呢？縮寫呢？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)。
長達20卷的《牛津英語詞典》第二版中有171476個仍在使用的單詞詞條，還有47156個廢棄單詞詞條。此外還要加上約9500個派生詞作爲詞條下面的分項。這些單詞中，超過半數是名詞，約四分之一的單詞是形容詞，七分之一左右的詞是動詞，剩下的是感嘆詞、連詞、介詞和詞綴等。這一數字並未把單詞的不同詞性(例如名詞和形容詞)分別計算。
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。
這表明，英語中有至少25萬單詞，其中的20%可能已經不再使用。這25萬單詞中不包括變型、《牛津英語詞典》中不收錄的專業術語和地方方言、以及尚未被已出版詞典收錄的單詞。如果要把同一單詞的不同含義分別計算，英語單詞的總數可能會接近75萬。
