我想問英文一共有幾多個詞語?

One of the more common questions that arrive for the Q&A section asks how many words there are in the English language. Almost as common are requests for the average size of a person’s vocabulary. These sound like easy questions; I have to tell you that they’re indeed easy to ask. But they're almost impossible to answer satisfactorily, because it all depends what you mean by word and by vocabulary (or even English).

What we mean by word sounds obvious, but it's not. Take a verb like climb. The rules of English allow you to generate the forms climbs, climbed, climbable, and climbing, the nouns climb and climber (and their plurals climbs and climbers), compounds such as climb-down and climbing frame, and phrasal verbs like climb on, climb over, and climb down. Now, here’s the question you’ve got to answer: are all these distinct words, or do you lump them all together under climb?

That this is not a trivial question can be proved by looking at half a dozen current dictionaries. You won’t find two that agree on what to list. Almost every word in the language has this fuzzy penumbra of inflected forms, separate senses and compounds, some to a much greater extent than climb. To take a famous case, the entry for set in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to 60,000 words. The noun alone has 47 separate senses listed. Are all these distinct words?

現在還未有人計算到有多少個英文詞語,就好似中文詞語一樣...數唔到...

比中文(91648＠.＠)少3928字!
註：這是大約數，因為日日都可能有新字出!

2006-11-25 18:52:19 補充：
我本書有教，佢出被年份係2006，所以應該好準!依家照我推斷，中文有10492字，英文比中文才4986字!我d數學好準架!信我啦!

英文一共有26個英文字母,
可是有一共有多少個詞語, 可以就是數之不盡.

about 50,000