With their continuously growing vocabularies, English or Korean probably has the most words of any language. But it depends on how you count those words—and which words are included in the count.
Knowing which language has the most words can help you decide the next language you’d like to learn or how to tell if you’re fluent in a language you’re currently learning. Discover what languages have the most words when you consider all the different ways to count them, and where English falls on that list once you’ve finished counting.
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How do we count words?
Deciding which language has the most words isn’t as easy as it sounds. Do you count the total words in a language’s dictionary? What about lexical variations, such as verb conjugation and affixes, or obsolete words that have fallen out of use (which is the case for many of the oldest languages in the world)?
Linguists consider all these factors when deciding what counts toward a language’s word count:
- homonyms: If words are spelled exactly the same way but have different meanings, they generally count as separate words (For example: “Set” as in “a set of knives” and “set” (as in “the sun sets”). These words usually have different meanings and etymological roots, and would be listed separately in a dictionary.
- conjugated verbs: Conjugated forms of verbs ( as in “run,” “ran,” and “running”) count as just one word, known as a lemma or a base word.
- words with affixes: If you add an affix to a word (such as with “sympathy” and “sympathetic”), it changes the word’s meaning and type of speech, and would count as separate words.
- obsolete words: Many linguists don’t consider words that have fallen out of modern usage when counting a language’s total words.
- new words: When new words are in common enough use to be added to a language’s dictionary, they’re often included in that language’s word count.
Languages with the most words in common use
When you consider all the factors above, which language has the most words? To find out, we used a combination of the language’s dictionary and any language projects designed to record its use.
While the order of the languages may vary as their lexicons shift and change, these languages currently have the largest vocabularies in the world:
| Language | Approximate Word Count |
| English | 470,000-1 million |
| Korean | 1 million |
| Tamil | 100,000-1 million |
| Portuguese | 110,000-818,000 |
| Swedish | 126,000-511,000 |
| Arabic | 200,000 |
1. English (1 million words in use)
Based on many linguistic estimations, English contains between 470,000 and one million words, depending on whether you’re counting dictionary words or total words ever used in the language. That number makes English the language with the most words in everyday use. Add the hundreds of new words added to dictionaries every year, combined with the many dialects and slang words used around the world, and the English vocabulary grows every time you use it!
2. Korean (1 million words in the dictionary)
If you count the number of dictionary entries over words in everyday use, Korean has almost as many words as English (and possibly more). In 2016, the National Institute of Korean Language launched the Urimalsaem (also known as the Woori Mal Saem). This open-source, online dictionary allows users to add Korean words for lexicographers to review and approve, making it a living document of Korean vocabulary. The Urimalsaem began at over one million words and continues to increase every day.
3. Tamil (100,000 official words)
Officially, Tamil contains around 3.8 lakh (one hundred thousand) words. But an online Tamil dictionary known as the Sorkuvai lists its current word count at over one million words. This open-source dictionary also allows users to add Tamil words that they know, including slang words that may not appear in formal Tamil language guides. The Sorkuvai includes Tamil words from many dialects, as well as over 100,000 Tamil words found in the Agarathi, another online dictionary.
4. Portuguese (up to around 800,000 words)
There are more than 818,000 Portuguese words in the Aulete Digital, the primary online Portuguese dictionary. Priberam’s Dictionary of the Portuguese Language, a contemporary Portuguese dictionary, lists over 110,000 words that include common phrases and general vocabulary. The true number of Portuguese words is likely between these numbers.
5. Swedish (over 500,000 words)
The Svenska Akademiens ordbok (Swedish Dictionary) contains 511,960 Swedish words. Published by the Swedish Academy, the dictionary is accompanied by the Svenska Akademiens Ordlista, a dictionary that lists over 126,000 modern Swedish words and phrases. Though it includes loanwords from other Scandinavian languages, Swedish isn’t as widely spoken as languages like English, giving it fewer dialects to add to the total word count.
6. Arabic (200,000 distinct words)
You may have heard that Arabic has over 12 million words, which would put it at the top of the “language with the most words” list. But this figure comes from a book that lists all possible roots, not just the words that have a definition. Linguists put the number of Arabic words closer to 200,000 distinct words. While it does include many root forms, Arabic does not include many words borrowed from other languages.
How do languages add new words to languages?
When it comes to which language has the most words, it would be more straightforward to find a list of languages with word counts that never change. But living languages are constantly shifting as old words fall out of use and new words begin to describe new situations and generations.
Agglutinative languages constantly combine morphemes
In agglutinative languages, such as Turkish, Korean, and Finnish, speakers regularly form new words as part of everyday speech. That’s because agglutinative languages easily combine morphemes, the smallest building blocks of meaning in a language, to create new words. (That’s also why Korean has so many words—each form of an agglutinative word is a separate word.)
Some of the the longest words in the world are created through agglutination, such as the Turkish word Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız, which translates to “You are one of those that we were not able to convert into Czechoslovakians.” But each new word counts as one more in a language’s vocabulary.
Some languages create compound words and portmanteaus
Some languages grow by adding two words together to create compound words. English is one such language, as you see in compound words like firehouse and basketball. New words also arise when you combine words into portmanteaus, which take pieces of two words (as in modern words like chillax, which combines chill and relax).
Other Germanic languages, including Dutch and German, create new compound words and portmanteaus all the time. Some long German compound words can describe very specific situations!
Loanwords make their way into new languages
When two cultures live near each other, they often exchange loanwords (borrowed words from another language). For example, English includes many loanwords from French, Spanish, and other Romance languages. That’s one of the reasons the English language includes so many words.
Cultures that have historically been more isolated in their languages don’t include many loanwords at all. While many European languages include strong Arabic influences, for example, Arabic includes very few non-Arabic loanwords.
Slang words are being added to dictionaries regularly
No matter what language you learned first, you know that slang can dramatically change the way people speak. Some slang makes its way into official dictionaries (including the popular Gen Z term yeet), while other slang words exist in casual conversations.
How many words do you need to know to be fluent?
Even if we did have a definitive answer to the number of words in a language, it wouldn’t be particularly useful to most language learners. An English dictionary may have hundreds of thousands of headwords, but the average native speaker only knows about 15,000-20,000 lemmas (remember, that’s the base form of a word before you modify it).
One linguistic professor estimates that people need to know just 800 lemmas of a language to understand 75% of daily conversations. So even when you learn which language has the most words, don’t worry—you don’t need to learn all of them to be considered fluent.
Key takeaways about what language has the most words
Understanding which language has the most words isn’t as clear-cut as it sounds. But knowing how many languages have large lexicons can teach you a lot about those languages and their histories—and may help you become fluent even faster.
- English has the most words that speakers use every day (between 470,000 and 1 million).
- Korean has the most total words in its dictionary (over 1 million).
- Tamil, Portuguese, Swedish, and Arabic all have over 200,000 words each.
- Not all words in a language count toward a total number, including conjugated verbs and obsolete words that people don’t use anymore.
- Words that count toward a language’s total vocabulary include words with affixes (including in agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages), homonyms, slang words, and loanwords.
- You only need to know around 800 lemmas of a language to be considered fluent, not all of the words in that language.
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