How Many Words in the Oxford English Dictionary?

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries, bringing the total to 228,132. Subtracting the archaic words leaves us with about 180,976 current words.

Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective, like alternative, or preposition and conjunction, like before and after).

Only 25% of the words in the English language are of native origin. Here is a list of the languages from which most of the remainder were borrowed from.

• Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
• French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
• Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
• Greek: 5.32%
• No etymology given: 4.03%
• Derived from proper names: 3.28%
• All other languages contributed less than 1%

Of course, there are more words in English than this but, as I have proved elsewere, they cannot be counted.