The phrase "how many letter words are there in the English language" seems ambiguous, but it can be interpreted in two ways:
- How many words of a specific letter length are there in the English language (for example, how many 5-letter words exist)?
- How many words are there in total in the English language?
Based on the search results:
- There are over 1 million words in English if you count all forms, including obsolete and rarely used words.
- The Oxford English Dictionary lists about 600,000 word forms, with about 171,476 currently in use.
- Words of different lengths vary widely, with 9-letter words being the most common length class, making up about 14.43% of words.
- For example, around 20% of English words have exactly 5 letters.
- There are only three one-letter words: "a," "I," and "o."
If you want the total number of words: it's roughly between 600,000 to over 1 million English words overall, with about 170,000 to 171,000 currently in common use. If you want counts by word length, here are some approximate distributions from a sample of 370,105 words:
Word Length| Percentage of Words
---|---
1 letter| 0.01%
2 letters| 0.12%
3 letters| 0.58%
4 letters| 1.94%
5 letters| 4.30%
6 letters| 8.07%
7 letters| 11.35%
8 letters| 13.95%
9 letters| 14.43%
10 letters| 12.39%
Thus, the number of words of a given length depends on the total lexicon considered but generally peaks around 8-9 letters in length.
