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This surprised me, so I've just looked it up. I'm now surprised for a different reason. "Webster's New International Dictionary" contains "more than 600,000 en
by michaelt 5y ago
This surprised me, so I've just looked it up. I'm now surprised for a different reason.
"Webster's New International Dictionary" contains "more than 600,000 entries" and it's a single volume, albeit a hefty one.
"Oxford English Dictionary" on the other hand, has "301,100 main entries" and yet the last paper version was 20 volumes. Presumably because OED contains more details per word.
Of course, for anything but a spelling bee it's pretty absurd to compare dictionaries by number of entries. Beyond a certain point: you're just buying more chaff like family names and alternative spellings.
- ghaff 5y agoThis is what Merriam-Webster says: "Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number." (That's different from the other list I saw.) But absolutely agree with your point. It's not like Britain and US vocabulary differs markedly in books and speaking.
- Vindicis 5y agoOn the homepage of the OED it says "More than 600,000 words, over a thousand years". Who's right? Who knows anymore.
- gowld 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Entries_and_relative_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Entr... > Supplementing the entry headwords, there are > 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives;[8] > 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations;[9] > 616,500 word-forms in total, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headword > The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has around 273,000 headwords along with 220,000 lemmas [word, compound, phrase, or derivative],[2]