The debate about which language has the most words can go on for quite some time. And the point here is not at all the lack of accurate data, but in the linguistic features of each language. First of all, the question of what exactly can be considered a word and language is embarrassing.
According to the established opinion, a word can be characterized as a collection of letters located between two spaces. But if we take, for example, the language of the Greenlandic Eskimos, then in it a whole sentence is considered one word. There are also problems in less exotic languages. For example, the Czech language assumes the continuous spelling of the particle "not" with verbs; in Turkish, this negation is in the center of the word. Thus, according to our rules, it turns out that each word with the negation in it should be counted separately.
The question arises: what to do with words that have different endings (for example, "beautiful", "beautiful", "beautiful"), as well as homonyms - for example, a castle as a structure and a castle as a device? Is it possible to count as separate words of the abbreviation - KVN, KGB, OVD, etc.? There are tens of thousands of such tricks in every language.
Even more tricky are the questions about what exactly is considered a language. Can different dialects and dialects refer to separate languages, or are they varieties of the main one? For example, in Africa and Europe it often happens that it is impossible to immediately determine which language is the main one for a particular dialect. And is it possible to say unequivocally to which of the languages some words belong? For example, "ataman" or "khata" are Ukrainian or Russian words? Which language can be attributed to the words "site", "server", "provider" - Russian, English, German or all at once?
Therefore, it is worth limiting ourselves only to general calculations that do not pretend to be scientific. As for the Russian language, according to linguists, it contains about 500,000 words. This number is approximate and does not include specific scientific terms. But here there are outdated, borrowed from other languages, complex words, affectionate, diminutive forms and others. If we turn to the authoritative Big Academic Dictionary, which consists of seventeen volumes, then it will contain 131,257 words. However, it should be borne in mind that the year of its publication is 1970, and the Russian language has undergone many changes over the past 40 years and has been significantly enriched with such concepts as, for example, "perestroika", "Internet", etc.
As for the English language, according to the Global Language Monitor, in 2009 the number of words in it exceeded the figure of one million and continues to grow. Moreover, the millionth word has become "Web 2.0". According to authoritative dictionaries, English is also ahead of Russian. For example, the 3rd edition of Webster's Dictionary contains 450,000 words, the Oxford one - about 500,000.
Of particular interest are hieroglyphic languages, in which a separate symbol denotes not a letter, but a whole word. In this case, direct comparisons are completely impossible. However, if we compare the dictionaries, such languages, to everyone's surprise, lose a lot. For example, the most complete Japanese dictionary contains 50,000 characters. But the Japanese Ministry of Education approved only 1,850 characters for everyday use. The Chinese language contains about 80 thousand hieroglyphs. But in reality, much less is used here as well. The state standard "Basic set of hieroglyphs" approved in 1981 includes 6763 hieroglyphs.
In an unexpected way, the Italian language is among the quantitative leaders. In it, all compound numbers are written in words together, in one word. The number series, as you know, is endless, so the number of words in the Italian language turns out to be endless.
