Too many words from Anat

Dear Word Spy,

It said in the paper that there are now ONE MILLION different words in English.

I think maybe that is too many words.

What do you think?

Bye for now, Anat


Dear Anat,

You know, there are probably even more than a million different words in English - I mean, how would you count them? And new words are being born every day (just like babies.)

But you can relax, nobody uses all those words. Even a very very VERY big dictionary would only have a quarter of those words inside it. And as for words that we really use and understand every day, well that would only be a matter of thousands. Of course, some people know more thousands than others!

Anyway, it's not the number of words, is it? It's how you use them. That's what I reckon. After all, Dr Seuss managed to write the wonderful "The Cat in the Hat" and he only used 236 different words. That's what I call clever!

Till next time,
The Word Spy