The richness of a language is expressed primarily in its vocabulary, or, as linguists say, in the richness of its vocabulary. How many words are there in our language? This question is very difficult to answer. For example, in the one-volume “Dictionary of the Russian Language” by S.I. Ozhegov, which includes only the most common words, there are 57 thousand words.

The large seventeen-volume academic dictionary contains more than 100 thousand words. But these are not all words of the Russian language. There are a lot of so-called dialect words that are used only in certain regions of our country. They are not part of the common literary language.

But they are often used by writers to convey the peculiarities of speech and life of the inhabitants of a particular region. AND.

S. Turgenev, for example, used southern Russian (mainly Oryol) words in his works: Paneva - Skirt, Buchilo - Deep hole with water, Kazyuli - Snakes, Lyadashchiy (man) - unfit for work, etc. M.A.

Sholokhov uses local Don words with great skill: Baz - Dvor, Kuren - House, Gutarit - Talk, Zaveska - Apron, Kubyt - Maybe, etc. Dialect words, as a rule, are not included in dictionaries of the literary language. But they were introduced into his famous “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” by V. I. Dal.

This dictionary was published in the 60s of the last century and includes more than 200 thousand words. The general literary language does not include professional words used by specialists.

They are included in terminological dictionaries (for example, dictionaries on radio engineering, medical, marine). This is out of necessity. After all, the total number of special terms of different sciences and crafts is huge: there are several million of them. No dictionary can contain them all, and it is not necessary. Only a specialist can fully understand the terms related to a particular profession. But there is no clear, sharp boundary between special terms and commonly used words in the literary language.

Nowadays, scientific achievements are increasingly entering everyday life; boys and girls are already familiar with the basics of science at school. “And today we probably don’t have people who are unfamiliar with the words Atom and Molecule. But these are terms of physics and chemistry. Now every person more or less familiar with technology knows and often uses technical terms: Transformer, transistor, relay, focusing, trajectory, battery And many others.

Therefore, the most common scientific and technical terms are included in dictionaries of the Russian literary language. But this is not the entire vocabulary of the language. Language has its own means, its own building material for the production of new words. Knowing prefixes, suffixes and the rules for their use, you can form new ones from ready-made words. Writers eagerly take advantage of this opportunity.

It is known how many new words V.V. Mayakovsky created: Enormous, proletariat leader, multiplying. He called the Soviet passport Hammercast and Serpasty. The poet did not violate the laws of the Russian language: the verb Ogromnit is formed from the adjective Ogromniy On the same principle as the verbs Zolotit, ruddy From the adjectives Golden, ruddy; The noun Proletariat Leader Created on the model of the words Fleet Leader, Commander; sickle - Like big-eyed, big-headed, etc.

Mayakovsky’s new formations have not entered into general use; they are not in dictionaries. But they are quite understandable to us, since they were created according to the laws of the Russian language, and they cannot be called non-Russian. We ourselves come up with such words if necessary at every step. We can, for example, say about a vase that it is bottle-shaped, and call university students University students, although these words are not in the dictionary and, perhaps, no one has used them before us. Such words testify to the rich possibilities of word formation inherent in the language. New words appear in the language constantly. Most of them are used little and quickly disappear, but some are consolidated and replenish the vocabulary of the language.

Therefore, the vocabulary wealth of the language is truly inexhaustible, and we cannot say exactly how many words there are in our language.

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How many words are there in Russian?

How many words are there in Russian and how many words are there in English?

Threatening attempts to "debunk the myths about the great and mighty"

It is well known that the vocabulary of different languages is not the same. The vocabulary of a civilized person can be tens of times greater than the vocabulary of a representative of some wild African tribe. It is also clear that within the same language, the vocabulary of different speakers varies greatly: a child and an adult, a janitor and a professor... In any case, no one doubts that a more extensive vocabulary is always associated with stock of knowledge and intellectual superiority. And now attention: what would you think if you were officially told that our Russian language is savage and contains five times fewer words than English? Of course, they would indignantly dispute this nonsense! However, such a “scientific opinion” is repeatedly broadcast in the media. This cannot but be alarming.

The last time this statement was heard on television was in 2011. But it is easier to discuss and analyze not television programs, but printed materials, which are easier to read (for example, on the Internet). So, you can look into the archives of the journal “Science and Life”. In the 6th issue of 2009, a doctor of philological sciences (!), a certain Miloslavsky, was published under the mocking title “The Great, Mighty Russian Language.” In it, the author “debunks myths” about the Russian language. In particular, it is stated that “according to very rough estimates, the dictionaries of the English literary language contain about 400 thousand words, German - about 250 thousand, Russian - about 150 thousand.” From which it is proposed to draw the conclusion that “the wealth of the Russian language is a myth” (almost a verbatim quote). In general, the article was written in the spirit of self-spitting, characteristic of the early 90s; I was even somewhat struck by its anachronism. Not to mention completely unscientific.

The author did not even mention the difficulties and problems of counting words and, in general, the problem of the possibility and relevance of any scientific definition and comparison of the vocabulary of entire languages. I consider it necessary to raise the following objections.

1) Different cultures have different criteria for the “admission” of words into the literary language. In the continental tradition, centralized planning dominates, while the Anglo-Saxons have a market element in everything (informal approach). For example, among the French, vocabulary is strictly censored by a body such as the Academie Francais (Academy of the French Language). She decides which words belong to literary French and which do not. Due to such censorship, a situation has arisen where it is believed that the French language, with all its rich literature, contains no more than 150,000-200,000 words. In English, anyone can come up with a word and immediately enter it into the language. So, Shakespeare wrote that he came up with about 1.7 thousand words from his writer's vocabulary of 21 thousand words. This, by the way, is a huge achievement for a writer; it is exceeded only by our Pushkin: 24 thousand words, an absolute and unsurpassed individual record for an active dictionary of all times - see "Dictionary of the Pushkin Language" in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961) . Most educated Europeans actively use no more than 8-10 thousand words, and passively - 50 thousand or more.

Obviously, the 150,000 Russian words named by the author of that article is a slightly rounded volume of the well-known Large Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (BAS), which in the 1970 edition in 17 volumes totaled 131,257 words. And the English 400,000 are, apparently, the latest editions of Oxford and Webster. Moreover, in the penultimate editions of these same English dictionaries there were several times fewer words (you can look up the specifics on the Internet). Where does this increase come from and why do their dictionaries contain more words than ours? The first reason is a shameless count of archaisms that modern Englishmen and Americans, of course, do not know. In the English philological tradition, the vocabulary of modern English is considered to be all words since the time of Shakespeare (a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov). In the Russian tradition, all pre-Petrine, and at the suggestion of the famous lexicographer Ushakov, even pre-Pushkin vocabulary is considered ancient or old Russian.

The second reason is that the criteria for the “acceptance” of new words into the language have become even less strict. Approaches to the English language are becoming more and more daring, and the assessments appearing on the Internet are simply fantastic. Thus, the GLM agency (Global Language Monitor, website www.languagemonitor.com) reports the appearance of... the millionth word in the English language! By which word is considered the millionth, it is immediately clear what kind of garbage dump they are trying to pass off the English language as: this is the “word” of Web 2.0! And this is along with the fact that (the) web is considered a separate word. Apparently, Web 1.0 was also considered a separate word somewhere! Moreover, they are not shy about counting phrases as words: “financial tsunami” - “Financial tsunami” was counted as the 1,000,001st word. In this case, in the Russian language, along with the words “financial” and “tsunami”, there is the word “financial tsunami”, which can be counted. However, the purists who compiled the BAS are unlikely to have included the word “tsunami” in it, since it is a foreign borrowing (for this, see the next paragraph below).

For reference:

Company analysis Global Language Monitor consists of several stages. At the first stage, the words that are included in the most famous dictionaries in English: Merriam-Webster's, Oxford English Dictionary, Macquarie's. It is worth noting that the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster's dictionary includes only 450 thousand English words. At the second stage, the company's employees, based on a special research algorithm, take into account all neologisms of the English language. At the same time, texts on the Internet are analyzed, including blogs and other informal network resources. Periodicals, both electronic and paper, and new literature in various fields are taken into account. It is this technique in the work of the Global Language Monitor company that causes a flurry of criticism from independent experts. The main reproach is that when calculating The vocabulary of the English language includes both obsolete words and phrases, as well as slang formations. In addition, in its accounting method, the company also takes into account words used only in varieties of the English language, for example, in China and Japan. And this amounts to about 20% of the total number of words recognized by company specialists. In addition to everything, linguistic blunders made by US President Bush were also taken into account as lexical innovations in the English language.

I propose: add all Chernomyrdin’s mistakes to the dictionary and thereby “overtake America”!

Classic methods of counting words are much more conservative. For example, the Oxford Dictionary takes into account only 300 thousand words.

2) English not only creates its own, but also very actively borrows foreign words from languages all over the world. We complain about the dominance of English borrowings, but that layer of scientific, technical and business vocabulary that penetrated into our language with the fall of the Iron Curtain is only a pitiful handful compared to the active borrowings produced by the English language without any false restraint. It has been half French since the time of William the Conqueror. It turns out that we are borrowing what we borrowed! Or, figuratively speaking, we repurchase what we bought. And now, when millions of people in multinational companies communicate in English, which is not their native language, whole layers of vocabulary are emerging: “Chinese English”, “Latin American English”, “Japanese English”. These layers of vocabulary belong to the so-called occasionalisms.

For reference:

Occasionalisms are words created spontaneously for one-time use. The question arises: at what point should this word be considered part of the vocabulary? How many repetitions of this word are needed in speech or in print to come to the conclusion that it has ceased to be a random artifact and has become a full-fledged part of the lexicon?

There are also words limited to a very narrow part of society. Let's say one family. A real example: all members of one family I know call boiled potatoes fried with sausage with the word “secondary roast”. This is their own invention, and I have never seen such a word anywhere else. Can this occasionalism be considered a full-fledged part of Russian vocabulary?

How many words are there in Russian?

How many words are there in Russian?
Previously I asked the question:
- Which language has the most words?
No one named the exact figure, but the order of the numbers is as follows - from 1 to 5 million words.
But the exact number of words in the Russian language, I think, cannot be found in any dictionary.

It’s unlikely that anyone will say for sure. I think the count is already in the millions. Yes, we are dealing with a living language, which means it is constantly changing. It is probably possible to accurately count words only in dead languages, Latin, for example. After all, no one speaks dead languages, with the exception of some scientists and even doctors, which means the language does not change, words do not disappear or be added. A living spoken language is always changing and growing with new words and expressions. At the same time, other words become obsolete and go out of circulation.

If we do not ignore archaisms in the Russian lexicon and also specific medical, technical and other terms, then the language is only growing in terms of the number of words.

One of the properties of language is its limitlessness. That's why they say that it is impossible to fully learn any language, except for dead ones, probably. Language is a very rapidly developing means of communication. It is constantly changing: some words go out of use, new ones are added. Therefore, talking about the number of words in a language is like counting the hairs on your head.

Typically dictionaries contain several tens of thousands of words. But in general, it is believed that the Russian language contains at least one million words. If we take into account all the words in the Russian language that were borrowed from other languages over thousands of years and became Russian)), then we can count two million, and maybe even more. The problem is that any language, including the Russian language, is constantly changing, new words and expressions appear, and also some words disappear, are lost, and become outdated. Therefore, most likely no one can tell us the exact number.

It's different in different dictionaries.

The total number of words in the Russian language is estimated at at least one million.

How many words are there in Russian?

Many people ask this question search engines.

In russian language there are currently five hundred and ninety-eight thousand four hundred and twenty-six words.

This is officially recorded in the latest edition of Spelling; th dictionary Institute of Russian Language Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation.

You cannot find the exact number of words in the Russian language in any dictionary. According to statistics, there are more than half a million of them, but the process of new words emerging is constant. In addition, dictionaries, as a rule, do not take into account lexical word forms, but they are also related to the Russian language. Even the most respected Large Academic Dictionary does not contain all the words, many adverbs are not included, there are no abbreviations that have recently been considered separate words, and many modern neologisms are not included.

Sorry, while I was answering a similar question, it was closed. I'll move my answer here.

Now, with the advent of new terms and neologisms, it is difficult to track the exact number of words, because the literary Russian language is replenished with new words every day, and if you also include slang and obscene words...

Let's take the Large Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (BAS) as a basis. BAS consists of seventeen volumes and contains 131,257 words. This data is only for the second half of the 60s. XX century.

However, the even more ancient Dahl Explanatory Dictionary, published in 1880, contains more than 200 thousand words.

Probably, it is impossible to name the exact number of words in the Russian language, as in any other language.

There are a lot of them and no dictionary will help you count them all and name their exact number.

The Russian language is limitless. It is very difficult to count words not only in Russian, but also in other languages of the world. After all, words arise every day. New ones appear, borrowed from other peoples and nations.

There is an opinion that words in Russian more than 500 thousand. But I think there are many more.

The Russian language is alive, it is constantly growing and changing, so no one can say for sure how many words are in Russian. When I was little, in our house I often leafed through a thick spelling dictionary of the Russian language, which contained 100 thousand words. It seemed to me that all the words were written in it. However, in fact, In russian language much more words. Even in the famous Dahl dictionary, 200 thousand words were published. The latest editions of spelling dictionaries number more than half a million Russian words.

Emeritus Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (Atlanta) and Member of the Academy of Russian Contemporary Literature
Mikhail Epstein said in an interview with the Nevskoe Vremya newspaper that the Russian language is by no means the greatest and most powerful.
During the 20th century, according to Epstein, it greatly degraded.

“The language developed dynamically until the October Revolution. English and Russian dictionaries were, as they say, neck and neck until the beginning of the twentieth century. Each of them contained approximately 200 thousand words.
When Webster's Dictionary was published in 1934, it already had 600 thousand words. And in 1940, Ushakov’s most complete dictionary for the Soviet era contained only 80 thousand words.
Today this gap is only getting worse. With the degeneration of the language, our life also degenerates; the emotional nuances and moral concepts that abounded in the Russian language in the 19th century disappear,” Epstein said.

He reported that in the academic dictionary of the Russian language in 1847 there were 160 words with the root “lyub”, but in modern dictionaries there are only 40 such words. And yet, for a century and a half, not a single new word with this root has appeared.

According to him, English is the donor language, and Russian is the importer.

“In English there are about a million words, in modern Russian, according to the most complete dictionaries, no more than 150 thousand,” Epstein noted.

We don’t even touch on the computer sphere: it is entirely English.

Original taken from aillarionov V
The English language has 1 million words. How many words are there in Russian?

Belatedly discovered some old news.

English passed the Million Word mark earlier today, June 10 at 10:22 am GMT
The Global Language Monitor announced today that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000 th English word or phrase added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months…

At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.

These are the fifteen finalists for the one millionth English word, all of which have met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations.
1,000,000: Web 2.0 - The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.
999,999: Jai Ho! - The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished.” Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”.
999,998: N00b — From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.
999,997: Slumdog - a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.
999,996: Cloud Computing - The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage.
999,995: Carbon Neutral - One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change.
999,994: Slow Food — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).
999,993: Octomom - The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets.
999,992: Greenwashing - Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly.
999,991: Sexting - Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.
999,990: Shovel Ready - Projects are ready to begin immediately upon the release of federal stimulus funds...

In addition, the 1,000,001 st word is Financial Tsunami - The global financial restructuring that seemingly swept out of nowhere, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets, in a matter of months
Each word was analyzed to determine which depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as number of appearances in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and social media (such as Twitter and YouTube). The Word with the highest PQI score was considered the 1,000,000th English language word. The Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) is used to track and analyze word usage.
Global Language Monitor has been tracking English word creation since 2003. Once it identifies new words (or neologisms) it measures their extent and depth of usage with its PQI technology.
http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/1000000th-english-word-announced

As of October 4, 2009, there are already 1,002,116 words in the English language.
http://www.languagemonitor.com/

How many words are there in modern Russian?
At what rate does the number of words in it increase?
Is anyone monitoring it?

P.S.
So far the maximum estimate is V. Dahl's Dictionary, about 200 thousand words.

Clarification of the linguistic richness of “The Great and Mighty” in the comments of A. Illarionov here:

The question of how many words there are in the Russian language is quite controversial, as is the answer itself. It is necessary to take into account whether the total number of Russian words includes adverbs, particles, and derived word forms, and from what sources the calculation of verbal designations can be most correctly made.

Using the voluminous and colorful Russian language, you can convey any emotions, feelings, experiences, describe what you saw and even heard, and create a vivid verbal picture.

the great and mighty Russian language

At the same time, it is important to use literate Russian, and not artificially derived forms of words of street origin. Although word forms from other languages that are firmly entrenched in our language are also quite popular.

But when counting specifically Russian words, many concepts and designations are not taken into account for a certain number of reasons. In addition, there are a number of vocabulary “deviations” that are usually not included in dictionaries that have absorbed all the richness of the Russian language. Among them are:

Professionalisms
Dialectisms
Jargonisms

Special terms of a technical, scientific, and industrial nature occupy a special place in the Russian language. Such words are also often not included in dictionaries, since they are narrowly focused and, by and large, little known.

Diversity and richness of Russian dictionaries

To more accurately determine the number of words in the Russian language, classical types of dictionaries are used. Most often people turn to these types of collections of Russian-language word definitions:

ALS - Large Academic Dictionary contains 131,257 words.
V. I. Dahl’s dictionary – more than 200 thousand words.
Ozhegov's dictionary in its only volume is represented by 57 thousand words.
The dictionary edited by Ushakov consists of words whose number is more than 85 thousand.

There is also a dictionary of modern Russian literary language, which was published by the USSR Academy of Sciences. The dictionary includes 120,480 words, and it consists of 17 volumes. The words that can be seen in this dictionary relate to the literary, artistic field, and are used in literate Russian colloquial speech on the radio, at school, in the press and journalism.

Many other existing dictionaries of the Russian language are more specific (“Dictionary of Abbreviations”, “Dictionary of the Pushkin Language”, etc.), so counting the number of words with their help would be quite problematic and incorrect.

Spelling not with numerals

Using spatial prepositions