You’ve probably seen the claims. Some dictionary site or viral trivia post says there are exactly 171,476 words in the English language. Or maybe they say it’s over a million. Honestly, both of those numbers are kind of a lie. If you’re looking for a definitive, line-by-line list of all words in the English language, you’re chasing a ghost.
Language doesn't sit still long enough to be photographed.
Think about it. By the time you finished reading a "complete" list, three teenagers in London would have invented a new slang term for "tired," a biochemist in Japan would have named a new synthetic compound, and a software engineer in San Francisco would have turned a noun into a verb that everyone starts using by Tuesday. English is a messy, sprawling, beautiful disaster. It’s the "Borg" of languages—it travels to other cultures, knocks on the door, and then steals their best vocabulary before moving on.
The Myth of the Master List
The biggest hurdle in creating a list of all words in the English language is deciding what actually counts as a word. This sounds simple until you’re the one holding the red pen.
Does "run" count as one word? Most people would say yes. But what about "runs," "ran," and "running"? In linguistics, we call the base form a "lexeme." If you only count lexemes, your list is going to be pretty short. If you count every single variation, the numbers explode. Then you hit the compound word problem. Is "hot dog" one word or two? What about "firefighter"?
Then we have the technical stuff. The Global Language Monitor (GLM) famously claimed back in 2009 that English had hit the one-million-word mark. It made for great headlines. People loved it. But most serious linguists and lexicographers—the folks who actually build dictionaries for a living—rolled their eyes hard. The GLM was counting things like "Slumdog," "Noob," and various "Chinglish" terms that hadn't really integrated into the global lexicon.
Dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are much more conservative. They require evidence. You can’t just make a word up; people have to actually use it in published writing over a sustained period. The second edition of the OED contains full entries for about 171,476 words in current use, plus another 47,156 obsolete words. But even they admit that’s just a snapshot of the "core" of the language. It leaves out the vast majority of scientific names, local dialects, and the slang that lives and dies on TikTok in a single weekend.
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Why We Can’t Just Google It
You might think that in 2026, with massive AI models and web scrapers, we’d have a master list by now. We don't. Because the internet is full of "non-words" that look like words.
If you scrape the web for a list of all words in the English language, you’re going to find a lot of "covfefe" and "pwned." You’ll find typos that have been repeated so often they start to look like legitimate vocabulary. You'll find "hamburgir."
And then there's the "Long Tail" of English.
There are thousands of words that are only used by about ten people on the planet. These are usually hyper-specific scientific terms. Take pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It’s a 45-letter word for a lung disease caused by inhaling fine ash and sand dust. It was actually invented specifically to be the longest word in the dictionary. Does it belong on your list? Probably. But what about the millions of chemical compounds that follow strict naming conventions? If we listed every possible chemical name, the list of all words in the English language would be billions of entries long, and 99.9% of it would be unreadable gibberish to anyone without a PhD in Organic Chemistry.
The Problem with Slang and Evolution
Slang is the high-speed engine of English. It’s where the most "life" happens.
Words like "rizz," which Oxford named Word of the Year recently, started in niche internet subcultures. Ten years ago, if you said someone had "rizz," people would think you were having a medical emergency. Today, it’s in the dictionary. This happens constantly. We lose words, too. When was the last time you used the word "fain" or "forsooth" in a serious conversation? They’re technically English, but they’re ghosts. They’re "zombie words" that inhabit a list but no longer inhabit our mouths.
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How Dictionaries Actually Decide
The process of getting onto a list of all words in the English language—at least an official one—is grueling. It’s not just about popularity. Lexicographers at Merriam-Webster or Collins look for "lexical stability."
- Widespread use: Is the word being used across different regions, or is it just a local thing in one town in Ohio?
- Sustained use: Is it a flash in the pan? Remember "on fleek"? That word hit a wall fast. It’s still around, but it didn't become a permanent pillar of the language like "cool" did.
- Meaningful use: Does it fill a gap? Sometimes we need a new word because the world changed. "Podcast" didn't exist until the hardware existed.
This is why a "complete" list is a moving target. You’re trying to count the drops in a waterfall while it’s raining.
The Hidden Diversity of English
We also have to talk about "World Englishes."
English isn't just British or American anymore. It belongs to India, Nigeria, Singapore, and the Philippines. Each of these places has its own massive vocabulary that is perfectly valid English. In Indian English, "prepone" is a common word meaning to move an appointment earlier (the opposite of postpone). In American English, we just say "move up." Is "prepone" an English word? Absolutely. But it wasn't in most "Western" lists for decades.
When you add up all these regional variations, the idea of a single list of all words in the English language becomes even more fragmented. It’s not a list; it’s a network.
The Practical Value of a "Big Enough" List
So, why do people keep searching for this?
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Usually, it’s for data science, Scrabble, or spell-checkers. If you’re a developer, you aren't looking for the "philosophical" list of every word ever uttered. You want a .txt file.
For those purposes, most people turn to something like the "SOWPODS" list (used in international Scrabble) or the "TWL" (the North American equivalent). These are curated, finite lists. They are "closed systems." They don't care if a word is cool; they care if it's "legal."
But if you’re a writer or a student, you shouldn't feel limited by the 170,000 words in a standard dictionary. The "real" English language is much bigger. Shakespeare didn't have a list of all words in the English language to follow—he just made up about 1,700 of them himself because the existing ones weren't good enough. He gave us "lonely," "gossip," and "swagger."
If he’d stuck to a list, our language would be a lot poorer.
Actionable Insights for Navigating the English Vocabulary
If you’re trying to master English or just understand the scale of it, don't get hung up on the "total count." Instead, focus on these realities:
- The Active vs. Passive Gap: The average adult only uses about 20,000 to 35,000 words actively. You might "know" 70,000, but you only speak a fraction. Focus on the quality of the words you use, not the quantity of a list.
- Context is King: A word’s "existence" matters less than its "usage." If you use a perfectly valid 18th-century word in a business email today, you’ll look like a weirdo, not a genius.
- Dictionary Lag: Understand that dictionaries are always 2-5 years behind the culture. If you see a word being used everywhere but it’s not in a "list," trust the culture over the list.
- Use Corpora for Real Data: If you really need to see how English is being used, stop looking at word lists and start looking at "Corpora." The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is a massive database of billions of words from real-world sources. It shows you how words are actually behaving in the wild.
The quest for a list of all words in the English language is ultimately a quest to understand how we communicate. We want to put a fence around the language so we can study it. But English is an escape artist. It will always find a way to grow, change, and surprise us.
Stop looking for the end of the list. It doesn't exist. Instead, start looking at the new words being born today. That’s where the real magic of English lives.
To actually apply this, you should start by auditing your own "active vocabulary." Keep a log for one day of the words you use that aren't basic "utility" words. You'll likely find that you rely on a very small subset of the language. To expand your range, don't just memorize a list; read widely across different centuries and genres. That is how you "download" the true list into your brain.