Building vocabulary
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How many words?
How many words are there in the English language?More than 1,000,000 (?)
Well, the question is almost impossible to answer. To begin with, it depends on what you mean by a "word". Are stone, stoned, stony, stonewall, stone-wall different words? Lexicographers (experts on words) like to talk about word families with a head word and "relatives".
Some people say that there are more than a million words. Maybe. Anyway there seem to be enough!
A really big dictionary may have 500,000 entries, often including obsolete (no longer used) words. A good bilingual dictionary (with translation from one language into another) usually has over 100,000 entries (head words).
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