Ever wondered which dictionary has the most words? Which language has the most words? How many words do dictionaries in each language usually have? In this article all these doubts will be answered!
Which language has the most words?
Asian languages usually have more expressions due to their ideograms that allow them to invent different ways of expressing themselves. THE Korean language even has over a million words in the dictionary, while Japanese over half a million.
Languages like Finnish, Kurdish and Swedish also have many words. The point is that the number of words does not always matter when speaking a language, since many still adopt words used centuries ago, others simply ignore their existence.
Nowadays the vocabulary of words of each language is much smaller than those present in the dictionary, whose purpose is to keep the words used throughout the ages, their origins, scientific words, rare words and words never used in everyday life.
Some claim that the English language is the one with the most words that can reach more than one million. The Portuguese language is also one with more than 500,000 words, with numerous slang words and words invented in everyday life.
Classical Arabic, among the best known languages, is definitely the richest in terms of the number of roots and the number of derivatives they all have, as well as the number of closed synonyms distinguished by subtle differences in meaning. This is a language that has 500 words for lion.
Which language has fewer words?
According to my research, the language with the fewest words is toki pona (“language simple ”), with about 120 words and 14 letters. As Esperanto, aiming to be a simple language, it was created in Canada by Sonja Lang.
Canadian Sonja Lang created the language in 2001 to reduce Project Ideas to the most basic level possible. You can learn the language in up to 30 hours, your goal is to simplify things, giving a word for fruits and vegetables, a word for birds and so on.
Another small language is Sranan tongo with only 340 words, but it is a popular and native language of the Suriname region with up to 500,000 speakers. Esperanto is without a doubt the most complete and simple language, with 16,000 words.
Dictionaries with more words
Below is a list of languages with the average word in the dictionaries. Remembering that we take the dictionaries with the largest number of words, of course it is not necessarily the number of words used by the speakers, nor are they close.
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| Korean | 1,100,373 |
| Finnish | 800,000 |
| Kurdish | 735,320 |
| Swedish | 600,000 |
| Icelandic | 560,000 |
| English | 520,000 |
| Italian | 500,000 |
| Japanese | 500,000 |
| Lithuanian | 500,000 |
| English | 470,000 |
| Dutch | 400,000 |
| Tamil | 380,000 |
| Chinese | 378,103 |
| English | 350,000 |
| Finnish | 350,000 |
| Persian | 343,466 |
| Norwegian | 330,000 |
| German | 330,000 |
| Norwegian | 300,000 |
| Gujarat | 281,377 |
| Urdu | 264,000 |
| Ukrainian | 253,000 |
| Czech | 250,000 |
| Portuguese | 250,000 |
| Serbo-Croatian | 241,000 |
| Belarusian | 223,000 |
| English | 207,016 |
| Finnish | 201,000 |
| Danish | 200,000 |
| Russian | 200,000 |
| Slovak | 200,000 |
| Hindi | 183,175 |
| Romanian | 180,000 |
| English | 171,476 |
| Kazakh | 166,000 |
| Russian | 150,000 |
| Belarusian | 150,000 |
| Polish | 140,000 |
| French | 135,000 |
| Ukrainian | 134,058 |
| Russian | 130,000 |
| Indonesian | 127,036 |
| Eastern Armenian | 125,000 |
| Tamil | 124,405 |
| Arabic | 120,000 |
| Bulgarian | 119,200 |
| Turkish | 114,767 |
| Belarusian | 112,462 |
| Slovenian | 110,180 |
| Finnish | 102,174 |
| Afrikaans | 100,000 |
| Polish | 100,000 |
| French | 100,000 |
| German | 100,000 |
| Spanish | 93,000 |
| Kurdish soranî dialect | 92,000 |
| Spanish | 90,000 |
| Dutch | 90,000 |
| Catalan | 88,500 |
| Chinese | 85,568 |
| Malay | 82,900 |
| Romanian | 67,000 |
| Tamazight | 60,000 |
| Galician | 59,999 |
| Western Armenian | 56,000 |
| Tartarus | 56,000 |
| Turkmen | 50,000 |
| Azerbaijani | 44,750 |
| Bashkir | 40,000 |
| Chuvash | 40,000 |
| Dargwa | 40,000 |
| Classical Latin | 39,589 |
| Avar | 36,000 |
| Lezgi | 28,000 |
| Chechen | 20,000 |
| Cabardian | 20,000 |
| Quechua | 20,000 |
| Esperanto | 16,780 |
| Ingush | 11,142 |
