> I have been told that English is the richest language (sic) because it
has around 500,000 words. My initial response was that this cannot be true.
Then I thought about the spell check dictionaries and Vr dictionaries which
are well in to 6 figures (125,000 words?) and the number of words which
exist for "snow" in the arctic circle communities and how much we talk
about the
weather......... and if this is so I wonder what the 100 least frequent
words are. Not really SEN but I would welcome comments: Thanks Martin
Miles EP, Devon<

The Web comes up with a variety of answers to this question.

According to Paolo Rossetti's ESL quiz at
http://www.lviv.net/bus/galpr/zaz/rus/tutor.htm#176,

176. How many words are there in the English language? (est. 2 million)

On the other hand, according to
http://mickey.queens.lib.ny.us/central/faqs/answ74.html (100 Most
Frequently Asked Questions at the (New York) Central Library),

Q74: How many words are there in the English language? Approximately
321,631. (Source: Oxford English Dictionary. Clarendon Press, 1989. Vol. 1.
p. xii)

And, according to "Triva Treks" at http://www.cgsta.com/news_v2_01_p03.htm,

How many words are there in the English language? (About 800,000).

I think you are right, it is likely to be into six figures at least. A more
interesting question is indeed what the equivalent of the plethora of snow
vocabulary in Inuit languages is, and I would say, from correspondence on
CompuServe's Foreign Language Forum, that English has a particularly rich
vocabulary of colour. There is no exact equivalent, for instance, in other
European languages, of the word "teal." ICT developers have had to name,
initially and sometimes only in English, in software menus, many hitherto
unnamed colours used as the background or foreground colours on Web pages.

I'm not sure how you would determine which were the 100 least used words in
English. How could you assemble a corpus of all the English-language
written texts in the world (not to mention all spoken English messages!) to
find out? There are some pretty obscure technical terms which would appear
very frequently in, say, manufacturing texts, but would be unknown outside
the world of scientific/industrial English.

David Wilson
Harton School, South Shields