We have many words in the English language, but we also have many words that are not in the English language, which conform to its morphology. So how many new words can we invent before we start running out of words? And are there more real words than fake words? Or vica versa? Should we make up new words, since there are probably many things that are not yet named?
Stole this from the Oxford website/article. 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). This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.
For some reason, this question reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's story "The Nine Billion Names of God."
