How many English words exist?

Answer 1

There is no absolute answer to this question. It depends on the definition of 'word' as a feature of language. A single spelling of a word (for example "set") may have multiple meanings. Fortunately English does not conjugate all verbs by multiple spelling changes, which is the largest number of words in many languages. But we do have plurals, and gerunds, and a large number of adjectives and adverbs formed from the base words (e.g. sets, setting, unsettled, subsets). And there are hyphenated and idiomatic uses (set-to, set-up).

It is also difficult to decide what counts as 'English' because of loanwords. These include medical and scientific terms. Also Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, and Japanese words used in Martial Arts. (Should we count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?)

One estimate

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, 250,000 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 750,000 to a million. And new words are being added all the time.

(see related links)
More than are listed in the largest dictionary and growing.
It's probably impossible to say, particularly as new words are constantly being coined.

The Oxford English Dictionary has over 600,000 words.
It isn't possible to count the number of words in any language; at best we can make rough estimates, and those estimates are very rough indeed.

Words are being added to every language all the time, so even if we could count the number of words in a language - and work out what counts as a word for the purpose of the calculation - that number would only apply on the day we did the counting.

See the link below for comments from Oxford Dictionaries on this.
Over 1 Million noone knows the Exact number Sorry
There is no single sensible answer to this question. It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually 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 (e.g. 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 it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog?

It's 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? Teenage slang? Abbreviations?

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. As you speak more words are being said or created making it impossible to even give a round about answer
Half a million

Answer 2

there is no single answer, the Oxford English Dictionary containes 171476 words in constant use and 47146 obsolete words. This suggests about 250,000 words. However with other technical additions there may be as many as 750,000 in total

Answer 3

There are some 750 million people using the English language. Dictionaries can list the number of words from 450,000 to over 616,000. In addition there are about 500,000 technical and scientific words. The English language contains the richest vocabulary

Answer 4

There are approximately 995,000 words in the English language.

Answer 5

It is not actually countable since there are like a billion.

Answer 6

over 1,161500

Answer 7

9