Best Word Ever (for this week)

One of the joys of reading (aside, you know, from the joy of reading) is the discovery of new words. I am one of those people who, if I hit a word I don’t recognize (or the use of which I don’t understand in a particular context), cannot move on to the next sentence until the void in my vocabulary is filled. Yes, I used to keep a dictionary somewhat accessible at almost all times, though now I’ll just quickly call up dictionary.com on my phone (however, as a Kindle/Nook/iPad holdout, I still see the whole click-and-define feature on those devices as somehow “cheating”).

It’s the promise of that discovery that figures into the never-ending allure of reading; the language is kinda like the Internet—you’re never going to finish it. English may not have the most native speakers in the world (it’s tied for second with Spanish behind—way behind—Mandarin Chinese), but it very likely has the most words. It’s impossible to know for sure, but even conservative estimates, by the people responsible for the Oxford English Dictionary, put the number of English words at 250,000, not counting all the variations or, of course, non-universal slang (you know, the fun stuff):

The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don’t take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).