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).

长达20卷的《牛津英语词典》第二版中有171476个仍在使用的单词词条，还有47156个废弃单词词条。此外还要加上约9500个派生词作为词条下面的分项。这些单词中，超过半数是名词，约四分之一的单词是形容词，七分之一左右的词是动词，剩下的是感叹词、连词、介词和词缀等。这一数字并未把单词的不同词性（例如名词和形容词）分别计算。

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.

这表明，英语中有至少25万单词，其中的20%可能已经不再使用。这25万单词中不包括变型、《牛津英语词典》中不收录的专业术语和地方方言、以及尚未被已出版词典收录的单词。如果要把同一单词的不同含义分别计算，英语单词的总数可能会接近75万。

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