How many words are there in Polish?

Answer 1

between 40,000 and 160,000 words.

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Ah, that's not that simple, really. Polish Scientific Publishers PWN Grand Orthografic Dictionary (mine, unofficial translation of the title) has something about 150,000 entries - but you can't say that that's all there is to polish language.

Polish language has a lot of word creating potential, e.g. you can create lots of diminutives from a lot of words, and even though they most probably won't be covered by dictionaries, they will be commonly understood (even if thought of as awkward at times). There's also more to that. You could probably then make that number significantly higher.

On the other hand, if you won't count loanwords, special (technical) terms/jargon, slang, dialect specific words, diminutives, etc, etc, you can make that number significantly lower.

So, while the question may seem simple at first, there's no definite answer for it.

Answer 2

It's not possible to count the words in any language, because there is no universal definition of what a word is. But most estimates place the number between 40,000 and 160,000words (which is the same range for almost all other languages).

Note: English is an exception. It has the largest number of words of any language in the world, estimated at 170,000 to 250,000 words. No language has more words than English.