# How large is the English language? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 11, 2014, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526 "2014-06-11T04:51:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2014, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/21 "2014-06-11T22:10:01Z")
Whenever someone starts waxing poetic about how expressive and vocabulary-filled English is, I like to point out that we don’t even have an English word for _taco_. It usually shuts them up for a few seconds. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2014, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/22 "2014-06-11T22:17:16Z")
> [@Ornery\_Bob](#): > > _…but chemicals don’t have names so much as that we have defined a method for verbalising chemical structures._ > > If a string of letters denotes a particular substance, then that string of letters is a name and how you derived it is irrelevant. Salt and Sodium Chloride are both names for a substance - as has been noted by Chief Pedant, the etymology of those names is irrelevant. By that logic, there’s an infinite number of words in the English language then, since the possible combination of atoms into molecules is theoretically limitless. I could write a computer program to dynamically generate every permutation of atoms, and by that definition, I’d have expanded the language by double within a few minutes, most likely. Salt is a **name** because if I don’t introduce you to salt, you’ll have no idea what it is and no way to figure it out from the information I’ve given you. Sodium and Chloride are, similarly, names. But if you know what sodium and chloride are, you’ll know “sodium chloride” the instance you examine it, because you’ve found something which matches the **description**. A name is a stand-in alias for a description, which only makes sense if you have been taught what the description is. If you just state the full description - however terse it may be - it’s still just a description. ---
**Author:** ![robardin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/43a26b/32.png) [@robardin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robardin)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/23 "2014-06-12T00:41:26Z")
It is large, it contains multitudes. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/24 "2014-06-12T01:14:27Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > Whenever someone starts waxing poetic about how expressive and vocabulary-filled English is, I like to point out that we don’t even have an English word for _taco_. It usually shuts them up for a few seconds. > > 😉 Sure we do. It’s “taco”. "We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James Nicoll ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/25 "2014-06-12T01:26:32Z")
Those winkies mean less and less every year. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/26 "2014-06-12T01:29:17Z")
Maybe my mistake was not including one of my own? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/27 "2014-06-12T01:38:03Z")
> [@Ornery\_Bob](#): > > _…but chemicals don’t have names so much as that we have defined a method for verbalising chemical structures._ > > If a string of letters denotes a particular substance, then that string of letters is a name and how you derived it is irrelevant. Salt and Sodium Chloride are both names for a substance - as has been noted by Chief Pedant, the etymology of those names is irrelevant. How about the names of numbers? Lots of people form them as compound words. (One, two, three … fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six … nine-million-eight-hundred-and-seventy-six-thousand-five-hundred-and-forty-three, nine-million-eight-hundred-and-seventy-six-thousand-five-hundred-and-forty-four, nine-million-eight-hundred-and-seventy-six-thousand-five-hundred-and-forty-five … ) If you do so, then there’s literally an infinite number of words in the English language. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/28 "2014-06-12T02:33:31Z")
> [@Superhal](#): > > If you think about it, how many of the words you read every day are “a” or “the.” The article I read was talking about unique words. That’s what I’m saying. We don’t use that many unique words every day, though. I guess you mean that’s an average working English vocabulary. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2014, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/29 "2014-06-12T02:38:48Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Every once in a while I make up a new technical word. Most recent one is “unimorphism”, a portmanteau for “uniform morphism” and “morphism” is also a new word (coined around 1940). I doubt if either one is in any dictionary. “Morphism” is in the OED, with cites back to 1955. (The first cite is from J. S. Huxley, claiming that he has invented the word.) ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2014, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/30 "2014-06-13T05:22:37Z")
> [@Superhal](#): > > I probably misremembered, but it was something like 1 mil specialized words. Probably what you remembered is the total vocabulary of the average, educated English speaker. IOW, the total lexicon a person knows. As for the frequency and number of words we use on a daily bases, the Cambridge International Corpus (among others) shows that about 2000 words make up about 80% of the language we use as English speakers. Of course, this includes utterances such as _yeah_, _oh_, and so forth, and other discourse marking. So the most frequently spoken verb in North American English, for example, is _know_, because of phrases like _you know_, _I know_, _you know what I mean_, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2014, 9:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/31 "2014-06-13T09:47:57Z")
“Morphism” is also a technical term in mathematics. I can’t figure out when it was first used. I’ve just checked through this history of category theory: > **[Timeline of category theory and related mathematics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_category_theory_and_related_mathematics)** > > This is a timeline of category theory and related mathematics. Its scope ("related mathematics") is taken as: > In this article, and in category theory in general, ∞ = ω. > Cosmoses are closed under dualization, parametrization and localization. Ross Street also introduces elementary cosmoses. > Jean Bénabou definition: A bicomplete symmetric monoidal closed category It appears that the concept was first proposed in 1943. The term might not have been used for this idea until 1958 though. It’s hard to tell. There’s a entry on the term “morphism” which doesn’t say anything about the history of the term: > **[Morphism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphism)** > > In mathematics, particularly in category theory, a morphism is a structure-preserving map from one mathematical structure to another one of the same type. The notion of morphism recurs in much of contemporary mathematics. In set theory, morphisms are functions; in linear algebra, linear transformations; in group theory, group homomorphisms; in analysis and topology, continuous functions, and so on. > In category theory, morphism is a broadly similar idea: the mathematical objects involved need not... ---
**Author:** ![Dana\_Scully](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5daacb/32.png) [@Dana\_Scully](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dana_Scully)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2014, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526/32 "2014-06-13T16:53:12Z")
I wonder if this question can be answered; English is a “live” language that is constantly changing and evolving. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-large-is-the-english-language/690526.md?page=1)