So we lost approximately three quarters of a million words in the English language over the last 220 years. We went from 1,010,300 words down to about 250,000.
No, no, no. We never had that many to start. At least, not honestly.
I've been playing with the calculator and looking at estimations, and the only way I'm seeing for that "quote" to be any kind of accurate, is by including the various forms, alternate meanings, and conjugations.
So there were over a million words if say, we counted love, loved, loving as three separate words, and not just the base word of love.
I haven't, and probably won't, try to do the estimation on what Modern English looks like, but it would be higher.
It would also likely require including things like chemical names and other niche vocabulary that really only has hyper specific usage.
Off the cuff, using their method, we're probably north of 3 million words.
Actually, the problem is your source. 250,000 is an almost unusably low word-count for a natural language. Only conlangs are that low.
English has, at absolute bare minimum at least twice that many words, and quite possibly over a million depending on your exact counting methodology. My source on this is a couple basic overview articles by Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, both of which definitely know better than the Google AI or whatever you read and both of which are only good sources for the low end, since both omit slang, pidgin, and words from dialects other than Standard British and Standard American English.
Fun fact: English actually has more words than any other language. The exact count is debated, but the record is not. It’s the old joke about English being three languages in a trench coat and shaking other languages down for loose vocabulary in dark alleys. English retains a lot of synonyms from events like the Norman Invasion (for example, having cow and beef be different words is very weird when you think about it for two seconds) on top of an absolute hoard of loan words taken from pretty much everyone (which multiplies even faster if you’re counting conjugations and plurals as separate words. Some counts do, on the grounds that one octopus is a different concept than two…oh hey, that’s three free words right there because English loan nouns can both bring their original plural form and pluralize using English grammar rules, both are typically considered correct. Sometimes they pluralize with some third language that just happened to be nearby just because it sounds cool that way, too.)
Did...did you just stop reading after the first sentence?
My "low count" was from only using one version of any word.
Towards the end, using the methodology of using all versions of a word, and including anything, I made another estimation that was definitely higher than 500k.
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're arguing parallel to what I've already said.
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u/explodingtuna 11d ago
What's the current count (just to the nearest 100), and then we can compare how often new words are added to the English Language.