Being that I’m on a dictionary-building mission right now, I decide to google how many words are in the English language so that I would know how far I had to go.

According to most sources, it is difficult to determine an accurate number. This is due to there being words that have multiple meanings, and therefore can be used in several different ways…What would the count be in those situations? Would the word be counted once, or per its different uses? There are also questions on how to tally: commonly used phrases, words of non-English origin that have crept into English vernacular, slang words, common abbreviations, derivatives, and words that are no longer commonly used.

According to Wikipedia: “The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words, not including many technical, scientific, and slang terms.”

According to Oxford Dictionary, their second edition 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.

With these listed stats, I anticipate having a good bulk of all of the English words in my steno dictionary before the end of 2013.

Happy dictionary building!