How many words are there in Russian. How many words in Russian and how many words in English

Candidate of Philological Sciences S. KARPUKHIN, (Samara).

Miniature from the Radziwill Chronicle (XIII century), which depicts the creators of the alphabet Cyril and Methodius.

"Primer" by Karion Istomin. Copper engraving by L. Bunin (1694).

The first secular engraving appeared in VF Burtsev's ABC (1637). On the top left is the inscription: "School".

The question seems to be very easy to answer. It is enough to turn to the most authoritative of modern dictionaries - the Great Academic Dictionary in 17 volumes. BAS - this is how philologists unofficially call this publication; its titular name is Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language. Here it is useful to recall that in 1970 this work was awarded the Lenin Prize. Unfortunately, from the first day of its birth, it has become a bibliographic rarity, and today it is less known and accessible to the average reader than Dahl's famous, but somewhat outdated dictionary. So, 131,257 words are recorded in the Big Academic Dictionary.

The number, as we see, is exact, but the answer to the question posed is not that inaccurate or incomplete - it is conditional and requires too many reservations that can change this number by an order of magnitude. So, the indicated number can "grow up" if we count adverbs in -o, -e, formed from qualitative adjectives, like frankly(from frank), wordlessly(from silent), - they are given in the dictionary not as independent units, but in articles with the original adjectives.

But these are still, so to speak, flowers ... As the very name of the dictionary indicates, it includes only words of the literary, that is, normalized, language. Meanwhile, the national Russian language is rich in a huge number of dialect words that still exist in rural areas and are not fully taken into account by any dictionary, such as Vologda goof off in meaning search or noun flow(bird), existing in Vyatka villages, etc. Of course, the huge wealth of dialect vocabulary (but again, far from exhaustive!) reflected Dahl's dictionary, compiled in the century before last. In total, it contains more than 200 thousand vocabulary units. There are also modern dictionaries of Russian dialects published in a particular area.

However, if dialectisms are not characteristic of the literary language (with the exception of artistic speech), then it very often uses words of a different type, which you will also not find in general explanatory dictionaries, even the most complete ones. These are terms, proper names, neologisms and some other categories of words. Let's take the usual newspaper phrase: "This unique textbook on computer optics was created by a team of employees of the Institute of Image Processing Systems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by a well-known scientist." Here all the words are generally understood and commonly used. However, there is no abbreviation in the Big Academic Dictionary RAS(linguists today recognize abbreviations as independent, separate words from decoding, by the way, there are special dictionaries of abbreviated words), as well as an adjective computer, which, however, like the original noun a computer, simply could not get into the dictionary created about half a century ago. The new words that have appeared in the Russian language over the past decades, especially those associated with the rapid changes in public life in the 1990s, should have been reflected in the 2nd edition of the Big Academic Dictionary in 20 volumes. But ... after the 4th volume, released in 1993, things died out.

A special area of vocabulary - terminology - the designation of scientific and technical concepts. They are known and used only among specialists of a particular scientific and technical field. It is unlikely that anyone is familiar, for example, with such words as zignella- type of algae (bot.), izafet- type of phrases in some languages (lingu.), etc. In principle, one person cannot know all the terms used in our language - because of their huge number. Each science, technical branch has developed its own terminology, sometimes consisting of tens of thousands of units. Imagine, for example, how many of them are contained in a multi-volume medical encyclopedia!

Proper nouns make up such a lexical layer of the national language (bearing a special name - "onomastics"), which, apparently, cannot even be quantified. Indeed, how many, say, in the Russian Federation, cities and villages, rivers and lakes, localities and mountains? Well-known, as in any other country, are the names of more or less large geographical objects (Volga, Ural, Paris, Seine) - they form only a small percentage of all toponymy. The lion's share is made up of toponyms used by local residents in a limited area, where often a ravine or stream, hillock or grove have their own name. For example, in the Samara region there is a village Molgachi. If residents use in speech " was in Molgachi", "I'm from Molgachi", which means that it is included in the Russian language, and regardless of its origin! And how many space objects have their own names - the so-called astronomers!

There is one more important remark. In linguistics, there is generally no exact and exhaustive definition of what a word is. It is not linguists who are "guilty" of this, but the extreme complexity of such a phenomenon as language. Simple example: go and walking- two words or varieties of one? Same way: house and house? The question is not so easy to resolve. After all, if we consider all participles as separate words ( walking), gerunds, forms of subjective evaluation ( house) and other formations and include them in the dictionary, it can swell so much that one copy of it will not fit, perhaps, in a medium-sized room. Exaggeration? Then try to figure out for yourself the number of so-called potential words that are not stable units of the language, but appear in speech as needed and at the same time look very similar to those that we usually use. These, in particular, include compound adjectives with the first component - the numeral. For example: two-ruble, twelve-ruble, one-day, thirty-day, six hundred and eighty-five kilometers etc. My computer underlined the last two words as non-existent(?!). Let's experiment further: one-legged, two-legged, three-legged, four-legged, five-legged… The computer confidently underlined the penultimate word, and after hesitating, the last one. How many such words, in principle, can be found in a speech? And how many of them have actually been used over the past two centuries - approximately how the age of the modern Russian language is estimated? Include them all in the dictionary or not? Only some of these formations are recorded in the Big Academic Dictionary.

It is impossible to count all the words of a particular living language, just because it does not remain unchanged for a single day. Some words or their separate meanings go out of use, new ones appear, and it is, of course, impossible to fix each such fact, since this process is gradual and, as a rule, elusive.

So, if we talk about some specific, limited "section" of the language, then a more or less exact number of words is known: the number of the most commonly used in different styles and genres has already been named - about 40 thousand (according to the "Frequency Dictionary of the Russian Language" under edited by L. N. Zasorina, Moscow, 1977). You can also name, for example, the number of the most common abbreviations - about 18 thousand (see: Alekseev D.I. et al. "Dictionary of abbreviations of the Russian language". M., 1983). Against the background of data on the lexical richness of the entire national language, the volume of a personal vocabulary is of interest, or, as linguists say, the volume of an active dictionary, that is, the number of words used by one person. For an educated "mere mortal" it is estimated at an average of 5-10 thousand words.

But even here there are peaks. So, in the "Dictionary of the language of Pushkin" in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961), an unsurpassed figure is recorded - approximately 24 thousand. Only the "Language Dictionary of V. I. Lenin", which was prepared for publication by the Institute of the Russian Language for a long time and for obvious reasons was never published, according to some sources, should have included about 30 thousand words. But today, in the absence of the dictionary itself, it is difficult to judge what was more in this promised record - genius or ideology.

There are statistical characteristics for many other local manifestations. No one can count absolutely all the words of the popular modern Russian language - neither scientists nor the most powerful computer. That is why linguists have come to the conclusion that language is quantitatively incalculable.

Honored Professor of Theory of Culture and Russian Literature at Emory University (Atlanta) and member of the Academy of Russian Modern Literature
Mikhail Epstein stated in an interview with the Nevskoe Vremya newspaper that the Russian language is by no means the greatest and most powerful.
During the twentieth century, he, according to Epstein, greatly degraded.

“The language developed dynamically until the October Revolution. English and Russian dictionaries went, as they say, head to head until the beginning of the 20th century. Each of them had about 200 thousand words.
When Webster's Dictionary came out in 1934, it already had 600,000 words. And in 1940, Ushakov's most complete dictionary for the Soviet era contained only 80,000 words.
Today, this gap is only getting worse. With the degeneration of the language, our life also degenerates, the emotional nuances and moral concepts that abounded in the Russian language in the 19th century disappear,” Epstein said.

He said that in the academic dictionary of the Russian language of 1847 there were 160 words with the root "love", and in modern dictionaries there are only 40 such words. And at the same time, not a single new word with this root has appeared in a century and a half.

According to him, English is the donor language, and Russian is the importer.

"In English there are about a million words, in modern Russian, according to the most complete dictionaries, no more than 150 thousand," Epstein noted.

We do not even touch on the computer sphere: it is entirely English.

Original taken from aillarionov in
In English - 1 million words. How many words are in Russian?

Belatedly discovered the old news.

English passed the Million Word mark earlier today, June 10 at 10:22 am GMT
The Global Language Monitor today announced that web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000 th English word or phrase added to the codex of fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months…

At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.

These are the fifteen finalists for the one millionth English word, all of which have met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations.
1,000,000: Web 2.0 - The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.
999,999: Jai Ho! - The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished”. Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”.
999,998: N00b - From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.
999,997: Slumdog - a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.
999,996: Cloud Computing - The 'cloud' has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage.
999,995: Carbon Neutral — One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change.
999,994: Slow Food - Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).
999,993: Octomom - The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets.
999,992: Greenwashing - Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly.
999,991: Sexting - Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.
999,990: Shovel Ready - Projects are ready to begin immediately upon the release of federal stimulus funds...

In addition, the 1,000,001 st word is Financial Tsunami - The global financial restructuring that seemingly swept out of nowhere, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets, in a matter of months
Each word was analyzed to determine which depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as number of appearances in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, the blogosphere, and social media (such as Twitter and YouTube). The Word with the highest PQI score was considered the 1,000,000th English language word. The Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) is used to track and analyze word usage.
Global Language Monitor has been tracking English word creation since 2003. Once it identifies new words (or neologisms) it measures their extent and depth of usage with its PQI technology.
http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/1000000th-english-word-announced

As of October 4, 2009, there are already 1,002,116 words in the English language.
http://www.languagemonitor.com/

How many words are there in modern Russian?
At what rate does the number of words increase in it?
Is anyone monitoring it?

P.S.
So far, the maximum rating is the Dictionary of V. Dahl, about 200 thousand words.

Elucidation of the linguistic richness of the "Great and Mighty" in the comments of A. Illarionov here:

The richness of a language is expressed primarily in the stock of words, or, as linguists say, in the richness of vocabulary. How many words are in our language? This question is very difficult to answer. For example, in the one-volume Dictionary of the Russian Language by S.I. Ozhegov, which includes only the most common words, there are 57 thousand words.

There are more than 100 thousand words in a large seventeen-volume academic dictionary. But these are far from all the words of the Russian language. There are a lot of so-called dialect words that are used only in certain regions of our country. They are not included in the general literary language.

But they are often used by writers to convey the characteristics of speech and life of the inhabitants of a particular region. AND.

S. Turgenev, for example, used South Russian (mainly Oryol) words in his works: Paneva - Skirt, Buchilo - Deep pit with water, Kazyuli - Snakes, Lyadaschiy (man) - unfit for work, etc. M.A.

Sholokhov uses local Don words with great skill: Baz - Yard, Kuren - House, Gutarit - Speak, Veska - Apron, Kubyt - Maybe, etc. Dialect words, as a rule, are not included in the dictionaries of the literary language. But they were introduced into his famous “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” by V. I. Dal.

This dictionary was published in the 60s of the last century and includes more than 200 thousand words. The common literary language does not include professional words used by specialists.

They are included in terminological dictionaries (for example, dictionaries on radio engineering, medical, marine). This is due to necessity. After all, the total number of special terms of different sciences and crafts is huge: there are several million of them. No dictionary is able to accommodate them all, and it is not necessary. Terms related to a particular profession can only be fully owned by a specialist. But there is no clear, sharp boundary between special terms and commonly used words of the literary language.

In our time, scientific achievements are increasingly entering everyday life; boys and girls already at school get acquainted with the basics of science. “And we do not have today, perhaps, people who are unfamiliar with the words Atom and Molecule. But these are the terms of physics and chemistry. Now every person more or less familiar with technology knows and often uses technical terms: Transformer, transistor, relay, focusing, trajectory, battery And many others.

Therefore, the most common scientific and technical terms are included in the dictionaries of the Russian literary language. But this is not the whole vocabulary of the language. Language has its own means, its own building material for the production of new words. Knowing prefixes, suffixes and the rules for their use, it is possible to form new ones from ready-made words. Writers take advantage of this opportunity.

It is known how many new words were created by V. V. Mayakovsky: Huge, proletarian leader, many-way. He called the Soviet passport Hammer and Sickle. The poet did not violate the laws of the Russian language: the verb Huge He is formed from the adjective Huge On the same principle as the verbs Golden, blush From adjectives Golden, ruddy; Noun Proletariat leader Created on the model of the words Naval commander, commander; sickle - Like big-eyed, big-headed, etc.

Mayakovsky's neoplasms were not included in general use, they are not in dictionaries. But they are quite understandable to us, since they were created according to the laws of the Russian language, and they cannot be called non-Russian. We ourselves invent such words, if necessary, at every step. We can, for example, say about a vase that it is bottle-shaped, And call university students Universities, although these words are not in the dictionary and, perhaps, no one used them before us. Such words testify to the richest possibilities of word formation inherent in the language. New words appear in the language all the time. Most of them are used little and quickly disappear, but some are fixed and replenish the vocabulary of the language.

Therefore, the vocabulary of the language is truly inexhaustible, and we cannot say exactly how many words there are in our language.

(No Ratings Yet)

How many words are in Russian?

Threatening attempts to "debunk myths about the great and mighty"

It is well known that the vocabulary of different languages is not the same. The lexicon of a civilized person can be dozens of times greater than the vocabulary of a representative of some wild African tribe. It is also clear that within the same language, the vocabulary of different speakers varies greatly: for a child and an adult, for a janitor and a professor ... In any case, no one doubts that a more extensive vocabulary is always associated with stock of knowledge and intellectual superiority. And now attention: what would you think if you were officially told that our Russian language is savage, contains five times fewer words than English? Of course, they would indignantly dispute this nonsense! However, such a "scientific opinion" is repeatedly broadcast in the media. This cannot but be alarming.

The last time this statement was made on television was in 2011. But it is easier to discuss and analyze not TV shows, but printed materials, which are easier to read (for example, on the Internet). So, you can look into the archive of the journal "Science and Life". In the 6th issue for 2009, a doctor of philological sciences (!), a certain Miloslavsky, was published under the mocking title "The Great, Mighty Russian Language". In it, the author "debunks the myths" about the Russian language. In particular, it is stated that "according to very rough estimates, the dictionaries of the English literary language contain about 400 thousand words, German - about 250 thousand, Russian - about 150 thousand". From which it is proposed to draw conclusions that "the wealth of the Russian language is a myth" (an almost verbatim quote). In general, the article is written in the spirit of self-spitting, characteristic of the early 90s; I was even somewhat struck by her anachronism. Not to mention the complete unscientific.

The author did not even mention the complexities and problems of counting words and, in general, the problem of the possibility and relevance of any scientific definition and comparison of the vocabulary of entire languages. I consider it necessary to raise the following objections.

1) In different cultures, the criteria for the "admission" of words into the literary language are different. The continental tradition is dominated by central planning, while the Anglo-Saxons have the element of the market in everything (informal approach). For example, the French vocabulary is subject to strict censorship by such an authority as the Academie Francais (Academy of the French Language). She decides which words belong to literary French and which do not. Due to such censorship, a situation has arisen where it is believed that in the French language, with all its richest literature, there are no more than 150,000-200,000 words. In English, everyone can come up with a word and immediately enter it into the language. So, Shakespeare wrote that he came up with about 1.7 thousand words from his writer's dictionary of 21 thousand words. By the way, this is a huge achievement for the writer, it is exceeded only by our Pushkin: 24 thousand words, an absolute and unsurpassed individual record of the active dictionary of all times - see "Pushkin's Dictionary of Language" in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961) . The majority of educated Europeans actively use no more than 8-10 thousand words, and passively use 50 thousand or more.

Obviously, the 150,000 Russian words named by the author of that article are a slightly rounded volume of the well-known Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (BAS), which in the 1970 edition in 17 volumes contained 131,257 words. And the English 400,000 are, apparently, the latest editions of Oxford and Webster. Moreover, in the penultimate editions of the same English dictionaries, there were several times fewer words (the specifics can be found on the Internet). Where does such an increase come from and why do their dictionaries contain more words than ours? The first reason is the shameless counting of archaisms, which modern Englishmen and Americans, of course, do not know. In the English philological tradition, the vocabulary of modern English is considered to be all words from the time of Shakespeare (a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov). In the Russian tradition, all pre-Petrine, and at the suggestion of the famous lexicographer Ushakov, even pre-Pushkin vocabulary is considered ancient or old Russian.

The second reason is that the criteria for "accepting" new words into the language have become even less stringent. Approaches to the English language are becoming more and more bold, the grades appearing on the Internet are simply fantastic. Thus, the GLM agency (Global Language Monitor, site www.languagemonitor.com) reports on the appearance of ... a millionth word in the English language! By the fact that the word is considered the millionth, it is immediately clear what kind of garbage dump they are trying to pass off the English language: this is the "word" of Web 2.0! And this is along with the fact that (the) web ("web") is considered a separate word. Obviously, Web 1.0 is also somewhere counted as a separate word! Moreover, they do not hesitate to count phrases as words: as 1,000,001 words, "financial tsunami" - "Financial tsunami" is counted. In this case, in Russian, along with the words "financial (th, th)" and "tsunami", there is the word "financial tsunami", which can be counted. However, the purists who composed the BAS are unlikely to include the word "tsunami" in it, since it is a foreign borrowing (see the next paragraph below on this).

For reference:

Company analysis Global Language Monitor consists of several stages. At the first stage, the words that are included in the most famous dictionaries in English: Merriam-Webster's, Oxford English Dictionary, Macquarie's. At the same time, it is worth noting that the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's dictionary included only 450 thousand English words. At the second stage, the company's employees, based on a special research algorithm, take into account all the neologisms of the English language. At the same time, texts on the Internet are analyzed, including blogs and other informal network resources.Periodical publications, both in electronic and paper form, new literature of various directions are taken into account.It is this technique in the work of Global Language Monitor that causes a flurry of criticism from independent experts.The main reproach is that when calculating the English vocabulary includes both obsolete words and phrases, as well as slang formations.In addition, in its accounting method, the company takes into account words that are used only in varieties of English, for example, in China and Japan.And this is about 20% of the total number of words that are recognized by specialists companies. On top of that, as lexical novelties of the English language, language blunders made by the President of the United States - Bush are also taken into account.

I propose: to enter into the dictionary all the mistakes of Chernomyrdin and thereby "overtake America"!

Classical methods of counting words are much more conservative. For example, the Oxford Dictionary takes into account only 300,000 words.

2) English not only creates its own, but also very actively borrows other people's words from the languages of the whole world. We complain about the dominance of English borrowings, but the layer of scientific, technical and business vocabulary that penetrated our language with the fall of the Iron Curtain is only a miserable handful compared to the active borrowings produced by the English language without any false embarrassment. Since the time of William the Conqueror, it has been half French. It turns out that we borrow borrowed! Or, figuratively speaking, we repurchase what we bought. And now, when millions of people in multinational companies communicate in English, which is not their native language, there are whole layers of vocabulary "Chinese English", "Latin American English", "Japanese English". These layers of vocabulary belong to the so-called occasionalisms.

For reference:

Occasionalisms- these are words created spontaneously, for a single use. The question arises - from what moment should this word be considered part of the vocabulary? How many repetitions of this word in speech or in print do you need to come to the conclusion that it has ceased to be an accidental artifact and has become a full-fledged part of the vocabulary?

There are also words limited to a very narrow part of society. Let's say one family. A real example: all members of a family I know call boiled potatoes fried with sausage the word “second fried”. This is their own invention, and I have never seen such a word anywhere else. Can this occasionalism be considered a full-fledged part of the Russian vocabulary?

Of course not! But the Americans would count.

There are dialects in every language, in English it is British, Australian, American, Canadian, etc. But when a community arises of hundreds of thousands of non-native speakers who actively communicate in English, which serves as a means of communication for them or acts as a business language (language business communication), they enrich the language with the words of their native language and in other ways develop a kind of regional jargon, which can hardly be called a dialect in the traditional sense. Moreover, it does not have a clear geographical localization, it is the language of the blogosphere, forums and e-mail. Of course, it also contains such "originally English" words as babushka, bomzh, pelmeni, etc. According to GLM, such words, mainly of Chinese and Japanese origin, occupy up to 20-25% of modern English (in their understanding). In this case, a paradoxical situation arises: native English speakers themselves often do not understand the vocabulary of such "international English"! In the Russian language, too, of course, borrowings regularly appear, the influx of which has increased dramatically in recent years: "router", "merchandiser", "cleaning" and other freak words. But they will never be included in the BAS and other dictionaries of the Russian language. The maximum that they can count on is the inclusion of foreign words in dictionaries. English philologists, apparently, do not distinguish between foreign and their native words.

3) The vocabulary of English, due to the informal approach characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons, has been overestimated in the past few decades also due to the count in the general dictionary of the supposedly literary language of words from other layers of speech: scientific, technical and other vocabulary. We do not consider words such as "flange" or "carburetor" to be literary, these are technical terms - and they do, because don't see much of a difference. At the same time, the assessment of the Russian language contained in the BAS is clearly underestimated due to the reverse picture: the dominance of the formal approach in the Soviet language school. How can there be only 150 thousand words in the Russian language, when only one Dahl dictionary contains about 200 thousand words, today, for the most part, archaisms! It’s just that we don’t count archaisms, but they do (however, I already wrote about this above, in paragraph 1). And if we take technical terms, then in our two-volume (or how many volumes there, I don’t remember already) Polytechnic Dictionary alone, we have about a million terms.

4) the richness of the language is complemented by two sources: word formation and inflection. The latter is an order of magnitude richer in Russian than in English. It is precisely the scarcity of its inflection that the English language tries to compensate for by word formation (or rather, by borrowing words - see paragraph 2 above). Such a moment as word formation according to regular rules is also considered differently in the English and Russian traditions.

For example, in modern English it is possible to collapse into one word a whole phrase of two, three, four or more words, getting something like the word "self-made-man". And such words, becoming common, fall into explanatory dictionaries.

In Russian, the possibilities of word formation with the help of prefixes and suffixes are very wide. Expressions like “a rabbit that didn’t jump over a hole” are not at all uncommon in Russian. However, the first word does not fall into Russian explanatory dictionaries as occasionalism, and the second - as a diminutive, formed according to regular rules.

Summarize. The main core of the language, both English and Russian, contains at least 250 and hardly more than 300 thousand words. To this, in both languages, you can add, or you can not add (BAS does not add): archaisms and dialectisms (okhlobystnut, endova, veretyo, bright) - about 100-200 thousand more words; technical terms, mostly borrowed (driver, caliper, molding) - at least 300-500 thousand; jargon, aka slang, which can be household, youth, journalistic, professional (cut, Windows, Cherkizon, PR man, setup) - another 100 thousand. It turns out about 700 thousand. And we inflate them to a million: in Russian - by including derivative words like "under-jumped", in English - thanks to borrowings from Chinese, Arabic and Japanese. So, if you wish, you can simulate the reverse situation, when in Russian there will be under a million words, and in English - only 300 thousand.

The question arises: what, pundits do not know all this? Of course they understand! They just can't know. Then why do they write it? Obviously, the question goes beyond the purely scientific sphere. First, they need something to justify their own negligence in compiling dictionaries. The same BAS has not been reissued, it seems, since 1970. When the need for reprinting was ripe, the work in 1993 ended on the 4th volume. But this is not the only reason. I cannot get rid of the thought that some of these statements are custom-made and pursue suggestive goals. Someone needs the territory of this country to turn into a source of cheap raw materials with a submissive and small population, devoid of national identity and pride. In this context, the blow to the Russian language as the basis of culture and self-identification is understandable. The main thing is not to "be fooled" (here is another neologism, by the way).

L.N. Powder flask, 2009-2011

There are four times more words in the Oxford Dictionary than in BAS - the Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language. "The Great and Mighty" is full of English borrowings. Schoolchildren ceased to understand Pushkin. What is happening with the Russian language? Does it generate new words? Why are our dictionaries so thin? These questions of "RG" are answered by one of the authors of the Great Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language - the famous BAS Lyudmila Kruglikova.

How is vocabulary counted? Why is the Oxford Dictionary so thick?

Ludmila Kruglikova: Linguists avoid this kind of comparison between languages and dictionaries. Each has its own specifics. For example, the Webster Dictionary includes symbols, for example, of chemical elements: B (boron), Ba (barium), Be (beryllium), Br (bromine) and so on, abbreviations for measures of length, weight, volume: km (kilometer), kg (kilogram), bbl (barrel) ... Moreover, explanatory dictionaries of the English language began to include symbols for designating the size of sheets of paper: A3, A4, A5, as well as, for example, the @ symbol.

Therefore, the conclusion about the poverty of the Russian language and the wealth of English on the grounds that the Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (BAS), which began to appear in 2004 (22 volumes out of the estimated 33 published), will contain 150,000 words, and Oxford (The Oxford English) Dictionary, abbreviated OED) - 600,000, nothing more than a hoax. ALS reflects the vocabulary of the modern literary language only, and the Oxford Dictionary - words of all varieties and all varieties (American, Canadian, etc.) of the English language since 1150, including the dead ones.

And how many words are there in Russian, if you count in English?

Ludmila Kruglikova: If we add, for example, dialect words to the 150,000 words of the modern Russian literary language, we will get 400,000 words...

How to explain the fact that one of the most famous English dictionaries, Webster's, began to lose weight dramatically, and the time of "weight loss" fell on the Second World War and the beginning of the "cold" one?

Ludmila Kruglikova: One should not look for some kind of politics in linguistic processes. Webster's Dictionary, which appeared in 1909, contained 400,000 English words. Its second edition (1934) contains 600,000 words, and the third (1961) contains 450,000 words. Based on this, it can be stated that since 1934 a catastrophic degeneration of the English language began. And the reason for such sharp jumps is simply that the second and third editions had different editors, and they have different principles for approaching the selection of words.

Merriam-Webster's website says, "An English dictionary is estimated to contain about a million words." Is this an honest number?

Ludmila Kruglikova: Most linguists took the estimate with a grain of salt, and some said they wouldn't be surprised if it was estimated at a quarter of a million.

Where did the million come from then?

Ludmila Kruglikova: Since 2006, one J. J. Payak, a marketing and analytics specialist, founder of Global Language Monitor, has repeatedly stated that the millionth word of the English language will soon be recorded. That word has become, according to Payak, "Web 2.0", which is a technical term. By the way, there is already Web 3.0, and on the Web we are talking about the imminent appearance of Web 4.0, Web 5.0. If we include all such formations, then soon it will be possible to talk about the billionth word of the English language.

How do the British and Americans relate to such sensations?

Ludmila Kruglikova: To quote Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley: "Our admiration for the immensity of the English language comes from a kind of linguistic imperialism - the feeling that 'our dictionaries are bigger than theirs'. But that doesn't really make us or richer linguistically."

But even among the researchers of the "great and mighty" there are linguistic pessimists who believe that the roots of the Russian language are "barren": they do not give birth to new words, and most neologisms are of foreign origin...

Ludmila Kruglikova: Linguist and philosopher Mikhail Epshtein claims that in the 19th century there were 150 words with the root "love", while our contemporaries know three times less. Meanwhile, in Tikhonov's "Derivative Dictionary of the Russian Language", numbering about 145,000 words of the modern Russian literary language, there are 310 words with the root "lyub". And if you count starting from the first monuments of writing, you get 441 words. In English, according to the OED, there are only 108 lexemes with the same root (love) at the beginning of a word.

Do modern Russians produce new words "about love"?

Ludmila Kruglikova: At the beginning of the 20th century, the noun "book lover" appeared, and then "lover of nature", "monogamous", "love-game", "love-hate", "love-carrot", "lovelessness". With a quick glance, I counted at least 40 words with the root "love" that appeared in the 20th - early 21st centuries. In English with the root (love), only five units entered the language in the twentieth century (from 1907 to 1989), and after that time, none.

How active are our compatriots in political word creation now?

Ludmila Kruglikova: In this regard, it is quite interesting to read comments on the Internet. The events in Ukraine brought to life such lexemes as maydauns, maydanuts, onizhedeti, ukry, dill, psaking, Fashington, Geyropa and others. Whether they survive or not, time will tell.

Our deputies periodically rebel against borrowing. Where is their critical limit in language? 70% - catastrophic?

Ludmila Kruglikova: According to linguists, in the second edition of the Webster's Dictionary, only 35% of native English words, the remaining 65% are borrowings. But so far, nothing catastrophic has happened. The Russian language is indeed heavily influenced by English. But its enrichment with anglicisms is observed primarily in the sphere of non-national vocabulary, among which terms from the field of sports, computer science, economics, and finance predominate. It is bad if they begin to influence the structure of the language. This does not happen with Russian. Foreign words adapt to the system, borrowed roots are overgrown with Russian affixes, for example: post, emoticon, okayushki, like and even like.

For 10 years of work on BAS, 22 volumes have been made - this is two-thirds of the work. You are not reproached for slowness?

Ludmila Kruglikova: 5 full-time linguists, 3 part-timers and several employees of the publishing house are working on ALS. An average of two volumes are published per year. 78 linguists, 46 freelancers, as well as 200 consultants, programmers, marketers work on the Oxford Dictionary. When the New York office of the Oxford Dictionary found out about our pace of work with meager forces, their work plan was increased, and the editor-in-chief was sent into retirement.

Portal for the student. Self-training

How many words are there in Russian. How many words in Russian and how many words in English

Other essays on the topic:

Threatening attempts to "debunk myths about the great and mighty"

For reference:

I propose: to enter into the dictionary all the mistakes of Chernomyrdin and thereby "overtake America"!

For reference:

Of course not! But the Americans would count.

Portal for the student. Self-training

Other essays on the topic:

Threatening attempts to "debunk myths about the great and mighty"

For reference:

I propose: to enter into the dictionary all the mistakes of Chernomyrdin and thereby "overtake America"!

For reference:

Of course not! But the Americans would count.

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