How many words does English have?
Research
The English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026) has 689,006 English headwords outside proper names. 101,394 of them occur at least once in 100 million words of written English, and 20,399 at least once in a million.
By part of speech
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How many are in use
| Written frequency | Headwords |
|---|---|
| 1 or more per million words | 20,399 |
| 1 to 10 per 10 million | 30,138 |
| 1 to 10 per 100 million | 50,857 |
| not in the frequency list | 587,612 |
Frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
The longest words in written use
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract); in written use: Zipf 1 or more (wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media)).
Method and limits
A headword is a Wiktionary entry title for English (a word with several parts of speech counts once per spelling). Inflected forms (482,319 of them, such as ran or cats) are not counted as words. Wiktionary is written by volunteers and keeps growing; its count is larger than a printed dictionary's because it records technical, regional and rare words.
How this was written
The text of this analysis was written with AI tools; its figures are queries on PlainSpell's database, and the text was checked against them. No figure is typed by hand. Editorial policy · Report an error.