English synonymous & part of speech word use
- the English language has a huge number of words that have multiple definitions
- other languages may be more explicit with distinct words that English will cover with a single word.
- for example:
English words & parts of speech distribution
- English contains about 600,000 words
- as counted by the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words
- the Dictionary also counts 250,000 "distinct" words, excluding inflections (word ending changes)
- when word definitions are counted, English has 1,402,895 words
- i.e., the word "love" generally has five definitions in the dictionary
- when counting "headwords" and "lemmas" (words produced from a headword), English has 578,707 words
- "headword" = a word from which other words are derived, such as "break > broken > broke
- see
Parts of Speech frequency as percent of all words
parts of speech as percentage of all words
- in general, English consists of
- Adjectives: 25%
- Nouns: 50%
- Verbs: 7%
parts of speech as percentage of word usage, conversational v. formal/academic:
English Language Percent Frequency of Use of Parts of Speech
|
Adjectives
|
Adverbs
|
Conjunctions
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Determiners
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Nouns
|
Prepositions
|
Pronouns
|
Verbs
|
Conversational
|
2.5%
|
5%
|
4.5%
|
4.5%
|
15%
|
5.5%
|
16.5%
|
12.5%
|
Formal/ Academic
|
10%
|
3%
|
5%
|
10%
|
30%
|
15%
|
4%
|
10%
|
|
Adjectives
|
Adverbs
|
|
|
Nouns
|
|
|
Verbs
|
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