According to the Global Language Monitor, the English language currently has more than one million words. The most interesting thing is that this number continues to grow. The reason for this is the flexibility and openness of the language. He easily learns words and phrases from another language, adapts them, creates neologisms and is not afraid of "slang" used in everyday life. Historically, the English language has adopted Latin, French, Germanic, and Greek roots as the basis for its expansion.
For example, the Oxford English dictionary alone has about 600,000 words. It does not include technical terms, slang or obsolete forms.
For comparison, the Russian language has 150-200 thousand words, including obsolete grammatical forms - archaisms. About 30,000 of these archaisms are actively used in everyday life.
The Chinese language, which holds the record for the number of hieroglyphs, is not very rich in vocabulary. Its structure does not allow to increase vocabulary.
Greek is one of the richest languages in terms of science and philosophy. However, in everyday speech it is inferior to English in terms of volume.
The number of words in the German language, famous for its complex compound words, does not exceed 300-400 thousand. These words often have a repetitive structure.
The English language creates new words every day, especially in the fields of technology, culture and politics. This makes it a living and ever-changing language.
Linguists say that the English language is "not afraid" to include anything. Even mistakes, colloquialisms, and memes (movements, images, phrases, videos, or other cultural elements) are becoming part of the language, giving it an edge in global communication. The language can adapt to any context, from a scientific paper to TikTok.
More words in a language is not always better. This makes learning difficult and requires constant updating of vocabulary. Despite this, English remains the world's largest language in terms of recorded units. This record has not yet been updated.