How many English verbs do we have?
Correction: there are over 9000 regular verbs. - lazarus1907 May 22, 2011
This was in response to when I stated that there were well over 400 regular verbs in Spanish. And I know lazarus1907 stated there were 150 irregular verbs.
The English verb count according to wordwizard.com is as follows:
The Oxford English Dictionary says the following:
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 sub entries. 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).
This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the ‘OED,’ or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.
Using the OED’s crude estimate of 1/7, this would imply about 25,000 verbs (1/7 of ~ 171,000) as ‘full entries in current use’ in their Second Edition. And, if we apply the 1/7 rule to their above qualified definition of ‘distinct English words, . . .’ (if it still applies) we get about 36,000 verbs (1/7 of ~ 250,000). Finally, if we apply the rule to the above ‘three quarters of a million,’ which includes distinct senses, we get about 100,000 verbs (1/7 of ~ 750,000).
2 Answers
Well, this is only for freakies, but in this page they have until 100.800 entries of infinitives in Spanish, including regionalims, scientific, technical, and historical terms.
This is only as curiosity,of course, because I've had a look at the first 1000 and I think I only know 5 or 6 of them.
In good English dictionaries, over 90% of the words are foreign to most speakers, while average educated speakers may understand as much as 70% - 80% of them, and maybe some "encyclopedia-people" over 50%. The RAE contains nearly 11,000 verbs, not including pronominal variations, which is more than 4 times what a really educated speaker needs. I guess than English has at least 20,000, considering how often it borrows terms from other languages. This figure can grow considerably if we include phrasal verbs, of course.
