目前英文单词数量已经增加到多少个了？

171,476

more information:

How many words are there in the English language?

There is no single sensible answer to this question. It is impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it is so hard to decide what counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (dogs plural noun, dogs present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since we might also find hot-dog or even hotdog?

It is also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?

The Second Edition of the 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 interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (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.

1)英语单词的准确数量，没有正式的统计，语言学家一般认为，英语单词(不包括专用词汇、人名、地名等)，大约有17万个，其中约7万个是已经或者即将废弃的，因此英语单词的大致数量是10万个。
(2)英语单词中，不会连续出现三个相同的字母，但如果我们给单词添加后缀，则可能出现这种情况，比如governess(女总督)变成governessship(女总督职务)。
(3)英语单词中，字母不重复的最长单词是uncopyrightable(不能获得版权保护的)，由15个不重复的字母组成。
(4)英语中最著名的一个回文，是拿破仑被流放到Elba岛时说的一句话：Able was I ere I saw Elba(在我看到Elba岛之前，我曾所向无敌)，这句话不论是从左向右看，还是从右向左看，内容都一样。
(5)在英语中，一般人即能看懂的最长单词是antidisestablishm-entarianism(赞同国家对教会的支持)，由28个字母组成。

可是英语到底有多少单词，说出来吓你一跳，九十八万八千九百六十八个。这是由一个叫Global Language Monitor 的组织发布的。当然，有人提出了置疑，以下是一篇相关的文章。Word CountAre there really 988,968 words in the English language?