How many Russian words are there in the world? Approximately how many words are there in world languages ​​(Russian, English, Chinese, etc.)

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

A 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 V. F. Burtsev's "ABC" (1637). At the top left is the inscription: "school".

The question seems to be very simple to answer. It is enough to turn to the most authoritative of modern dictionaries - the Large Academic Dictionary in 17 volumes. BAS - this is how philologists unofficially call this publication; its titular title is “Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language”. It is worth remembering here that in 1970 this work was awarded the Lenin Prize. Unfortunately, from the first day it was published, it became a bibliographic rarity, and today it is less known and accessible to the average reader than the famous, but somewhat outdated Dahl dictionary. So, the Big Academic Dictionary contains 131,257 words.

The number, as we see, is accurate, 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. Thus, the indicated quantity can “grow” if we count adverbs ending in -o, -e, formed from qualitative adjectives, like frankly(from frank), silently(from silent), - they are listed in the dictionary not as independent units, but in articles with the original adjectives.

But these are still, so to speak, flowers... As the name of the dictionary itself indicates, it includes only words of a literary, that is, standardized, language. Meanwhile, the national Russian language is rich in a huge number of languages ​​that still exist today. rural areas and dialect words not fully taken into account by any dictionary, such as Vologda screw up in meaning search or noun flow(bird), found in Vyatka villages, etc. Of course, the enormous wealth of dialect vocabulary (but again, far from exhaustive!) was reflected in 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 one area or another.

However, if dialectisms are not characteristic of a literary language (with the exception of artistic speech), then it very often uses words of a different type, which you also will 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 a common newspaper phrase: “This unique textbook on computer optics was created by a team of employees from the Institute of Image Processing Systems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by a famous scientist.” Here all the words are generally understandable and commonly used. However, the Big Academic Dictionary does not contain the abbreviation RAS(linguists today recognize abbreviations as independent words, separate from the decoding; by the way, there are special dictionaries of abbreviated words), as well as an adjective computer, which, however, like the original noun computer, simply could not get into the dictionary created about half a century ago. New words that have appeared in the Russian language over the past decades, especially associated with rapid changes in public life 90s, was supposed to reflect the 2nd edition of the Great Academic Dictionary in 20 volumes. But... after the 4th volume, published in 1993, the matter died out.

A special area of ​​vocabulary is terminology - the designation of scientific and technical concepts. They are known and used only among specialists in one or another scientific and technical field. It is unlikely that anyone is familiar with, for example, words such as Zignella- type of algae (bot.), izafet- type of phrases in some languages ​​(linguistic), etc. In principle, one person cannot know all the terms used in our language - due to their enormous number. Each science and 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 constitute such a lexical layer of the national language (bearing a special name - “onomastics”), which, apparently, cannot be even approximately quantified. In fact, how many, say, in Russian Federation cities and villages, rivers and lakes, areas 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 consists of toponyms used by local residents in a limited area, where often a ravine or stream, a hillock or a grove has given name. For example, in the Samara region there is a village Silent people. If residents use " I was in Molgachi", "I am from Molgachi", which means it is part of the Russian language, regardless of its origin! And how many space objects have their own names - so-called astronyms!

There is one more significant remark. In linguistics, there is generally no precise and comprehensive definition of what a word is. It is not linguists who are “to blame” for this, but the extreme complexity of such a phenomenon as language. Simple example: go And walking- two words or variations of one? Also: house And little house? The issue is not so easy to resolve. After all, if you count in separate words all participles ( walking), gerunds, forms of subjective assessment ( little 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 estimate for yourself the number of so-called potential words, which are not stable units of language, but appear in speech out of necessity and at the same time are very similar in appearance to those that we usually use. These include, in particular, compound adjectives with the first component - numeral. For example: two-ruble, twelve-ruble, one-day, thirty-day, six hundred eighty-five kilometer etc. My computer highlighted as non-existent two last words(?!). Let's experiment further: one-legged, two-legged, three-legged, four-legged, five-legged... The computer confidently underlined the penultimate word, and “hesitatingly”, and the last one. How many such words can, in principle, appear in speech? And how many of them were actually used over the past two centuries - is this approximately how the age of the modern Russian language is estimated? Should I include them all in the dictionary or not? Only a few of these formations are recorded in the Big Academic Dictionary.

It is impossible to count all the words of a particular living language because it does not remain unchanged for a single day. Some words or their individual meanings go out of use, new ones appear, and it is, of course, impossible to record 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 common ones in different styles and genres - about 40 thousand (according to the "Frequency Dictionary of the Russian Language" edited by L. N. Zasorina. M., 1977). You can also mention, for example, the number of the most commonly used 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 wealth of the entire national language, the volume of a personal vocabulary, or, as linguists say, the volume of an active vocabulary, that is, the number of words used by one person, is of interest. For an educated “mere mortal” it is estimated at an average of 5-10 thousand words.

But even here there are peaks. Thus, in the “Dictionary of the Pushkin Language” in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961), an unsurpassed figure is recorded - approximately 24 thousand. Only the “Dictionary of the Language of V. I. Lenin,” which was prepared for a long time for publication by the Institute of the Russian Language 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 came to the conclusion: language is quantitatively incalculable.

The well-worn cliche about “the great and mighty” cannot yet be revised, thank God. That's right: both great and powerful. This is confirmed by those foreigners who spoke our language well. For example, Pushkin’s French contemporary Prosper Merimee wrote: “The Russian language, as far as I can judge about it, is the richest of all European dialects and seems deliberately created to express the finest shades. Gifted with wonderful conciseness, combined with clarity, he is content with one word to convey thoughts when another language would require whole phrases for this.”

But, alas, the state of the Russian language at the end of the twentieth century causes concern among scientists. Along with the falling birth rate in the country, there is also impoverishment vocabulary. If Vladimir Dahl's dictionary contained 200 thousand words, then in all Russian language dictionaries published over the past 70 years, their number fluctuates between 125-130 thousand words. According to the most generous estimates, no more than 170 thousand.

But this is very little for developed language, with a great past and, hopefully, a great future. For comparison: in modern English there are approximately 750 thousand words. In modern German, according to various estimates, from 185 to 300 thousand words.

But even this not-so-innumerable verbal wealth lies with us as a dead weight. The number of the most common words in different styles and genres is only about 40-50 thousand. And the vocabulary of a less educated “mere mortal” is estimated on average at 3-5 thousand words. Some individuals are known to easily get by with thirty words.

Well, how many words did our classics use? It is known, for example, that Pushkin used 21 290 in his writings and letters different words. There is also data on the number of words of other writers: Gogol (only in “ Dead souls") - about 10,000 words, Yesenin - 18,890. But the record holder here is (which, of course, is a big surprise) Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He used over 37,500 words in his works and letters. True, among them there are many that Pushkin never dreamed of: extremely important, empirio-criticism, Marxism, the International, Rabkrin, etc.

But the fact remains a fact. This is truly true: I would learn Russian just for that...

Solzhenitsyn, who compiled the “Russian Dictionary of Language Expansion,” believed that in the modern literary language it is possible to revive about 40-50 thousand more words that are considered outdated and dialectal. So, theoretically, we seem to have some kind of reserve. In practice, all the “enrichment” of the Russian language in recent decades occurs due to the assimilation and modification foreign words and concepts. Their “native” neologisms are, in the absolute majority, jargon and vulgarisms.

It's strange that our inner feeling The richness of the Russian language does not correspond to its actual poverty.

The state of the Russian language at the end of the twentieth century is alarming. It seems that along with the depopulation of the country, there is a delexexification of its language and an impoverishment of vocabulary. This is especially striking in contrast to the dynamic development of the Russian language in the 19th century and the explosive dynamics of a number of European and Asian languages ​​in the 20th century. In the 19th century, the Russian linguistic space was quickly filling up, Dahl’s dictionary is bursting with an abundance of words, although even then they were already directed more quickly to the past than to the future - to ancient crafts, crafts, things of homespun life, to the existence of man in nature and agriculture. But also moral and mental phenomena are presented abundantly: there are few roots, but so many derivatives, for one root “good” - about 200 words! It seems that another century of rapid development has grown densely, luxuriantly, and the population of this plain will become denser, and there will be joy from the diversity of faces, voices, and meanings.

However, in the 20th century, the language began to decline; its crown thinned out two or three times, if not more, branches broke off, and many of the roots were left with black stumps on which several branches could barely support. The most alarming thing is that the original Russian roots in the twentieth century slowed down and even stopped growing, and many branches were cut down. In Dahl's root nest -love- there are about 150 words, from “to love” to “lovingly generous”, from “lyubushka” to “fornication” (this does not include prefixes). The four-volume Academic Dictionary of 1982 contains 41 words.
Even if we take into account that the Academic Dictionary is more normative in the selection of words, it cannot but be alarming that the root “love” has not given any growth in a hundred years: not a single new branch on this verbal tree, which is quickly losing its lush crown. The same is with the nest -good-: out of 200 words, 56 remain. Or here is the root “lep”, from which the words have come down to us: sculpt, sculpt, sculpt, stucco, stucco, flatbread. Other prefixless words starting with this root are in modern dictionaries No. And from Dahl: molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, molding, flatbread, molding, flatbread, flatbread, flatbread, flatbread, flatbread, flatbread, flatbread, flatbread, cakey, flattering, flatbread. There were twenty-six branches at the root, seven remained.

All dictionaries of the Russian language of the Soviet era, published over 70 years, contain a total of about 125 thousand words. This is very little for a developed language, with a great literary past and, hopefully, a great future. For comparison: V. Dahl’s Dictionary contains 200 thousand words. In modern English there are approximately 750 thousand words: in the third edition of Webster's (1961) - 450 thousand, in the complete Oxford (1992) - 500 thousand, and more than half of the words in these dictionaries do not match. In modern German, according to various estimates, there are from 185 to 300 thousand words.

When I ask my philologically observant friends what words are last years The Russian language has become richer, they begin to sprinkle in Anglicisms. No, please, with Russian roots,” I clarify the question. The excitement quickly fades, and it is difficult to extract from memory “voice”, “scumbag”, “lawlessness”, “disassembly”, “run into”, “steam” (“strain”) and several other equally new and mostly low-born (thieves ) words that jumped from rags to riches; the list has not changed for years.
Meanwhile, in five years of the new century English language enriched with thousands of new words (and therefore realities, concepts, ideas) created on its own root basis. Let me give a few examples that relate only to such a narrow area of ​​modern Anglo-American culture as literary activity: backstory (factual, documentary basis of fiction); banalysis (banal analysis, banal analysis); blog (blog, personal online diary or forum); belligerati (writers who support war and imperialism); carnography (description of violence); bibliotherapy (bibliotherapy); fanfic (works created on the theme of a particular film or television show by its fans); faxlore, xeroxlore (modern urban folklore distributed by fax or photocopier); fictomercial (a work in which the writer, for a fee, inserts the names of the company and its products); glurge (a sentimental story spread across e-mail); Internetese (networking language, language of network communication)...

If the English language increased its vocabulary several times during the twentieth century, the Russian language rather suffered losses and currently has, according to the most generous estimates, no more than 150 thousand lexical units.
The newest “Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language,” the first volume of which was published in 2005 by the St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is designed for 20 volumes, long years preparation and publication. It is supposed to include only 150 thousand words - and this takes into account everything that the post-Soviet years brought to the language.

At the same time, it should be recognized that in Russian language dictionaries huge number“inflated” units are suffixal formations of inflectional rather than word-formative order. As bitter as it may be to admit, the idea of ​​the lexical richness of the Russian language is largely based on diminutive suffixes, which triple and often even quintuple the number of nouns officially listed in dictionaries.

- philologist, philosopher, culturologist, essayist. Since 1990, Professor of Cultural Theory, Russian and Comparative Literature at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). Member of the Writers' Union (since 1978), Pen-Club and the Academy of Russian Contemporary Literature. Author of 16 books and about 500 articles and essays, translated into 14 foreign languages, including “Philosophy of the Possible” (St. Petersburg, 2001), “Space sign. On the future of the humanities” (M., 2004), “Postmodernity in Russian literature” (M., 2005), “All essays”, in 2 vols. (Ekaterinburg, 2005). Author of the network projects “InteLnet”, “Book of Books”, “The Gift of Words. Projective Dictionary of the Russian Language” and “Fan of Futures. Techno-humanitarian newsletter.” Winner of the Andrei Bely Prize (St. Petersburg, 1991) and the “Liberty” Prize (New York, 2000) for his contribution to Russian-American culture.

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To put it roughly, for example, “web” in modern English means “web” and “Internet”. At the same time, there is also an abbreviation word “internet”, therefore many (especially Russian) academics do not take into account “web” as two words. Although at the same time they may well designate “ball”, “ball”, “ball” and other derivatives by case, as unique words, each of which adds +1 to the “counter” of the Great and Mighty.

And Chinese doesn’t have words at all in our traditional understanding; they have ideograms. Hieroglyphs change meaning depending on their relative location, forming new lexemes. The system is so complex that even the name in the passport can be written in several different ways. And if you try to parse it into “words”, a name that is quite standard for us can mean “electric ass of a dragon heavenly mountains" or "a chest of unwashed sticks of omnipotence." For this reason, by the way, auto translators from Chinese produce such crap - on Ali, in particular. This is the language of contexts, and if you translate from it into European languages At the very least it will be possible without loss of meaning, but it is not possible to decompose it into a certain number of words due to the absence of this concept itself in the structure of the language.

So, all these discrepancies in attempts to “compare” even such close (on a planetary scale) Russian and English, or French and Spanish, lead to the fact that different sources(quite authoritative) the number of words in a language can differ significantly and even by orders of magnitude. So the topic is controversial and conflicting, because... everyone looks from their own bell tower and counts differently.

Just accept that this is one of the few scientific questions to which any answer will be someone's ridiculous propaganda or, more likely, just a mistake.

Exact number, of course, cannot be named for a number of reasons. But approximate data have long been summarized and analyzed by linguists. I will write about the two languages ​​with which I work the most.

English. Most linguists agree that the language of Shakespeare and Dickens contains approximately 1 million words. Depending on how exactly and what exactly is counted, the approximate error is “up to a quarter of a million.” Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged contains 470,000 dictionary entries (not words, please note). The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition is about the same.

Russian language. Ozhegov’s dictionary contains more than 70,000 words. Ushakov’s dictionary contains more than 90,000. BTS contains approximately 130,000 words. These figures cover, according to data, approximately 50% of all words recorded in the large dictionary card index (LFC) of the Institute for Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IL RAS). This allows, again, to roughly estimate the total number.

You can do wonders with the Russian language. There is nothing in life and in our consciousness that cannot be conveyed in Russian words. The sound of music, the spectral brilliance of colors, the play of light, the noise and shadow of gardens, the vagueness of sleep, the heavy rumble of a thunderstorm, the whisper of children and the rustle of sea gravel. There are no such sounds, colors, images and thoughts - complex and simple - for which there would not be an exact expression in our language...

K. Paustovsky

Is it possible to find out how many words there are in the Russian language? To do this, you should refer to Russian language dictionaries.

In a one-volume dictionary S.I. Ozhegova represented by about 57 thousand words. In a four-volume dictionary created under the editorship of D.N. Ushakova, more than 85 thousand words. In the seventeen-volume dictionary of modern Russian literary language, published USSR Academy of Sciences, located 120,480 words.

The presented dictionaries contain words of literary language , language of fiction, journalistic works, print, radio, science, school and so on.

Not mentioned in these dictionaries dialectisms , that is words that are known only in certain localities or areas, and professionalism, that is words that are used by people of a particular profession. For example, not everyone understands the words vedata, drill, eraser, but they are freely used by artists. Veduta is a work of landscape genre that accurately conveys the appearance of a particular city or area. Drill- in sculpture technology, a tool for rotating a drill, used in processing hard materials. Eraser- a device for working with watercolors without sticking paper to the board, consisting of two frames, one of which fits into the other.

An attempt was made to put all the words of the Russian language together IN AND. Dahl. In Dalevsky « Explanatory dictionary living Great Russian language" more 200 thousand words! Dahl worked on his dictionary 47 years old.

IN spoken language cultural people, writers and poets - from 15,000 to 18,000 words. And here it’s 200 thousand! Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin who had a dictionary of about 20,000 words, could express the most subtle emotional experiences. What a gamut, what a rainbow of human feelings, moods, thoughts a people can paint, possessing a countless treasure of 200 thousand words! " The Russian people created the Russian language, bright as a rainbow after a spring shower, accurate as arrows, melodious and rich, sincere, like a song over a cradle..."- wrote A.N. Tolstoy.

In dictionary IN AND. Dahl In addition to words of the literary language, many words of local dialects and dialects are collected.

Not all people who speak Russian can understand dialectisms. So, for example, in the Pskov region, instead of cranberry They say crane, instead of carrot– barge, rooster– Spiegun, big– sore and so on.

L. Uspensky told a story about what happened to the boys who were visiting their grandmother on vacation in the Pskov province: “I know two twins - very nice guys. Having visited their grandmother's collective farm in the Pskov region in the summer, they returned and amazed everyone at school and at home. They began to insert into their speech a great many words that were unknown to anyone either in Moscow or in Leningrad.”. It is not surprising that not everyone understood that little mice- This white cabbage butterflies, A populists– gray night moths."Why? Because there, in the outskirts of Pskov, people of the older generation still speak not ordinary Russian, a language common to all Russian people, but their own, special Pskov dialect. And sometimes it is very different from our speech. The guy laughs and says: “Our Aunt Nyuta tsudits- from all over the room the noise gets into the head" Who can understand what this phrase means: garbage is swept into a crack in the floor? At least translate from Pskov into Russian.”

Although dialectisms and professionalisms are not part of the general literary language, writers use them for speech characteristics of heroes , reproduction of the situation, environment where the action takes place.

In the Vologda region bee called lungwort, instead of the word reasonable They say narrow, greedy– salty, chew– croon and so on.

So how many words are there in the Russian language? Even if we limit ourselves to general literary vocabulary, we still will not be able to answer this question.

« For everything that exists in nature, the Russian language has a great variety good words and expressions", - said K. Paustovsky. The vocabulary wealth of the language is inexhaustible. The Russian language is fraught with possibilities that allow its speakers to create new and new words. No dictionary is able to record all the words in the Russian language.

“Let there be honor and glory to our language, which in its native richness, almost without any foreign admixture, flows like a proud, majestic river - it makes noise, thunders - and suddenly, if necessary, softens, gurgles like a gentle brook and sweetly flows into the soul , forming all measures. Which ones consist only of falling and rising human voice!» , wrote N.M. Karamzin.

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