Which Language Has The Most Words?   

While I'm not absolutely positive, I would think English would have more words. Sometimes when looking up a word in the dictionary, you will find several other words that have the exact same meaning, with only little nuances of difference to them. Take the simple word 'sell' for example, there's hawk, pander,dispose, transfer, cheat, deceive, or offer. There's probably a few that I missed, but they all can be interchanged with the word sell in different contexts of the word and sentence they're in. I don't know lots about other languages. My own complete dictionary is 6" thick, and the print is tiny, so I'm still thinking it would be English that has the most words. Good discussion...it's something that is not usually thought about (unless you're learning English or another foreign language lol)

If I am not mistaken, Chinese or Japanese have the most words. Each of them has some 30,000 character words. I thijnk it's that many. But it's a lot anyway.

This question is practically impossible to answer. However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.

The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.

English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore 'agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'.

It is impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it is so hard to decide what counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (dogs plural noun, dogs present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since we might also find hot-dog or even hot dog?

It is also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?

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.

Source: http://www.askoxford.com/?view=uk
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NEver thought of it for even the English words we have here have differnt accents to go by and they to are spelt some different!

Trading languages have bigger vocabularies than insular languages. English is a good example of a trading language. It is basically Anglo-Saxon in grammar and vocabulary, but has absorbed over half its vocabulary via Latin based languages (such as Latin itself, French, Italian and Spanish). Through its mercantile and eventual colonial links, it has absorbed vocabulary from all over the world. I would hazard a guess that English would have one of the largest, if not the largest vocabulary, as it has never had a central body regulating its vocabulary (as has had French).
ANother language with an enormous vocabulary is Malay/Indonesian. Like English, it was a trading language, used , in medieval times, from Indonesia to China, and to the Middle East. It is basically an Austronesian language, but, because of the religous and cultural history of the islands, has absorbed large amounts of vocabulary from Sanskrit, Tamil, ARabic/Persian, Dutch, and English. Because of the hundreds of regional languages in the islands, Indonesian has also absorbed regional vocabulary.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/lang/vocab.html discusses the topic

This site: http://members.aol.com/DrHumph/funetik.htm
suggests that English has the largest vocabulary, over three times as large as other languages.

I would guess that English has the most words, as it is continually adapting and melding new words together. Also if you include the older varients of it there would be several million words to go through. Slang dialects just in the Uk add a vast number of words too.

I heard it on a radio show that at present English has more than 600,000 words. wow, that's a huge amount comparing to Chinese. Chinese has about just 60,000 words. the reason is English and words of most of the language around the world are formed by putting letters together and a word can have many variation while Chinese words is not. Chinese words is also called Chinese characters. to those who don't read Chinese, they are pictures. to Chinese, a character has no variation. while I have no idea which language has most words, I perceive Chinese probably the language with least words.

I think your question is probably not possible to anwser.

I don't know, but give you some information I knew.
A chinese dictionary compiled and printed in the Qing dynasty in 1908, which was edited for several times, until the version in 1988 it explains up to 12,000,000(12 million)words.

oh....I guess English is the answer.Not sure.But,I am quite sure Modern Chinese is the language has the least words