Mom, how many words are in the English Language?

On the surface, John Michael seemed to pose a simple question...one that of course, Google would be able to answer. Right? However, this is what I found that lead into a one hour....yes, that's right, I said a one hour discussion on all the possiblities.

There are many problems in knowing even how to COUNT "words" -- some of which are mentioned below. But what we CAN say is that there is NO English dictionary that includes every word. This is for many reasons, including the fact that even "unabridged dictionaries" do not include all the scientific names in use, and cannot keep completely up to date with every word, since new ones are always being coined.At any rate, the number of *dictionary entries* in the most extensive unabridged dictionaries is slightly under a half million, so that would be a reasonable baseline and an estimate of a million is understandable, though not necessarily all that helpful

Anyway, here's where the problems begin. The question is WHAT do you include as a "distinct word" to list?

For instance:1) RELATED FORMS a) Do you count just the 'root form' (called a "lexeme")** or all the forms that are derived from it? e.g., do you just include "find" or do you add in the various forms finds, finding, found as separate words? Do you count "finder" separately? (and also the plural and possessive forms? b) Do you count noun & verb forms of the same root? c) When do you treat the different meanings of a noun (or any other word part) as a distinct word? (cf. "run" with the meaning "creek", "flaw" (as in a stocking), "scoring play in baseball", etc. )

2) COMPOUNDS a) How do you count COMPOUND words - you have "run" "away" and "home" -- are the nouns "run", "runaway" and "homerun" distinct? b) Related to compounds -- What about NUMBERS -- you can create new numbers ad infinitum! Does each one count as a new word? (More likely you'd want to count just one [or zero!] to twenty, thirty, forty...hundred, thousand, etc.) c) How far in series like "greatgrandfather" "greatgreatgrandfather" etc are we to count?

3) WORDS OF LIMITED USEa) DIALECTS - when a word is found only in one or a limited number of dialects, do you count it?b) technical terms limited to one field (e.g., medicine, law)c) foreign words (when are they added in as "English words"?)d) Archaic/obsolete/rarely used words -- when do we stop counting these (Does anything that has EVER been an English word count?)

Yes....we did discuss all of the possiblities and made multiple words lists. You know what? It was awesome!