How many words in English?

Mar 19, 2012 by

Numerous posts in this blog discussed attempts of scholars in a variety of fields outside linguistics — biologists, statisticians, anthropologists — to do linguistics. These attempts commonly result in “work”...

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American English from sea to shining sea

Sep 30, 2011 by

In a number of recent postings, I’ve discussed American English words that have penetrated into British English and vice versa. But it must be remembered that neither American English nor British English are uniform, but are...

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Is English the richest language?

Apr 18, 2011 by

I am often asked whether it is true that English (vocabulary) is the richest in the world. After all, English has words that do not have good counterparts in other languages, right? Say, there’s no appropriate Russian...

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