One of the most common questions that we get in the Word Power section is how many words there are in the English language. Almost as common are requests for the average size of a person?s vocabulary. These sound like easy questions; they are indeed easy to ask. But they are almost impossible to answer satisfactorily, because it all depends what you mean by word and by vocabulary (or even English).

What we mean by word sounds obvious, but it is not. Take a verb like climb. The rules of English language allow you to generate the forms ?climbs, climbed, climbable, and climbing, the nouns climb and climber (their plurals climbs and climbers), compounds such as climb-down and climbing-frame, and phrasal verbs like climb on, climb over, and climb down. Now, here?s the question you have to answer: are all these distinct words or do you lump them all together under climb?

In a wider sense, what do you include in your list of words? Do you count all the regional variations of English? or slang? dialect? family or private language? proper names and names of places? what about abbreviations? The biggest dictionary has more than 400,000 entries ? do you count them all as words? And what about informal and formal names for living things?

To take a specialist example, is saccharomyces cerevisiae, the formal name for bread yeast, to be counted as a word (or perhaps two)? If you say yes, you have to add another couple of million such names to the English-language word count. And what about medical terms, such as syncytiotrophoblastic or holoprosencephaly, that few of us ever encounter hopefully?

Ashveen KUTOWAROO

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