If you’ve ever taken a look at a Spanish conjugation table, you know that whether or not you count the inflected forms of a verb will seriously impact your final word count. This would also extend to conjugations of verbs, meaning that an infinitive verb and all of its conjugations, irregular or not, would count solely as one word. According to this condition, we would expect plural forms of words to be counted as one word (such as “bunny” and “bunnies”), as they are tied to one definition. Merriam Webster states that although they estimate the total count of English words (including technical acronyms, Latin species names, etc.) to be around 1 million, this number may be off by up to a quarter million.ĭespite this, dictionaries are still a great starting place for sorting out individual words which have unique meanings attached to them. Dictionaries even acknowledge the difficulty in pinning down a definitive count. After all, there are people dedicated to maintaining dictionaries for just this reason, right? Though a language often has a few prominent dictionaries that are considered official, word counts often differ between these and diverge even further when compared with glossaries. With the above example in mind, an easy way to decide if something is one “word” is to check to see if it has its own dictionary entry. However, what about open compound words such as “ice cream?” Certainly, as Aristotle said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Dictionary entries The most intuitive condition is that a word is what is separated by spaces in a language such as English or Spanish which uses an alphabet to create words (rather than characters). What counts as a “word?” The space between This dynamic nature of language is what makes determining the word count for a language a very complex task. The most notable trend of vocabulary growth in present-day Spanish is due to loan words from English, especially in the technical domain. Many English words, such as chocolate or barbeque (from barbacoa), came from interaction with the Spanish language, which had adopted these terms from indigenous languages of the newly “discovered” Americas. Most often, a language expands when it comes into close contact with another language and begins to incorporate grammatical features and/or loan words from that language. The Spanish language, with its international community of speakers and long history of intercultural exchange, is no exception. Languages are constantly evolving to suit the needs of their speakers.