List of dictionaries by number of words

This is a list of dictionaries considered authoritative or complete by approximate number of total words, or headwords, included. These figures do not take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective) and homographs. Although it is possible to count the number of entries in a dictionary, it is not possible to count the number of words in a language. In compiling a dictionary, a lexicographer decides whether the evidence of use is sufficient to justify an entry in the dictionary. This decision is not the same as determining whether the word exists.

Language	Dictionary	Approximate number of words	Notes	References
Icelandic	Orðabók Háskólans	More than 610,000	43,000 basic words and 519,000 compound words of which more than half are attested only once or don't get into print (“instant combinations”)	[1]
Japanese	Nihon Kokugo Daijiten	More than 500,000		[2]
Swedish	Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, Svenska Akademien	470,000-600,000	After having completed letters A through T SAOB includes 470,000 words, but is estimated to include 600,000 words when the alphabet is complete in 2017. Svenska Akademiens Ordlista, which includes only commonly used words, currently includes ~126,000 words after having added 13,500 and removed 9,000 in its latest edition, SAOL 14, plus an additional 200,000 still encountered words in earlier editions.	[3][4]
German	Deutsches Wörterbuch	330,000	330,000 words in use since the mid-fifteenth century. — Duden's Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache contains over 200,000 contemporary words.[5]	[6]
French	Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé	270,000	ATILF[7] (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française – Computer Processing and Analysis of the French Language) 135,000 (Larousse Dictionnaire de français, published by Editions Larousse)[8]	[9]
English	Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition	228,000	171,476 words in current use, 47,156 obsolete words and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries	[10]
Danish	Ordbog over det danske sprog, Dansk Sprognævn	200,000-300,000	Dansk Sprognævn grows with 5,000 to 7,000 words a year	[11]
Russian	Большой академический словарь русского языка (The Great Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language)	150,000		[12]
Portuguese	Grande Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa	120,000	The dictionary includes 120,000 separate entries, with 300,000 definitions.	[13]
Spanish	Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española, 23th edition, 2014	93,000		[14]
Indonesian	Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, 4th edition, 2008	90,049
Dutch	Van Dale, 14th edition, 2005	90,000		[15]
Bulgarian	Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language (monolingual academic explanatory dictionary), (Многотомен) Речник на българския език in Bulgarian, in 15+ volumes	119,200+ headwords	This dictionary covers vocabulary from the last 150 years of the Bulgarian language and is compiled and edited by linguistics (primarily native lexicographers and lexicologists) from The Institute for the Bulgarian Language (part of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). It includes basic, commonly used, literary, colloquial, dialectical, archaic and obsolete Bulgarian words, as well as some specialized terminology. The latest volume (15th) published in 2015 ends with headwords beginning with the (Bulgarian Cyrillic) letter Р.	[16]
Chinese	Zhonghua Zihai	85,568	Number of different characters. The Hanyu Da Cidian defines some 370,000 words.	[17][18][19]
Malaysian	Kamus Dewan, 4th Edition, 2005	82,900
Korean	Dictionary of the Dankook University	53,667 Chinese characters	420,269 compound words	[20]

References

1. "Hvað eru til mörg orð í íslensku?". University of Iceland. Retrieved 7 August 2016.
2. "NIHON KOKUGO DAIJITEN". Indiana University. Retrieved 7 August 2016.
3. "Engelsk har næppe flere ord end dansk". videnskab.dk. Retrieved 2016-08-14.
4. SAOL. Svenska Akademien. Retrieved 16 August 2016.
5. "Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache". Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Retrieved 16 August 2016.
6. "Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (The German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm)". Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities & Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Retrieved 16 August 2016. Also available online.
7. "Presentation - Site du laboratoire ATILF". www.atilf.fr. Retrieved 2016-10-28.
8. "French Dictionary". Larousse. Retrieved 28 October 2016.
9. "TLFi : Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé - Site du laboratoire ATILF". www.atilf.fr (in French). Retrieved 2016-10-28.
10. "How many words are there in the English language?". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 6 August 2016.
11. "Engelsk har næppe flere ord end dansk". videnskab.dk. Retrieved 2016-08-14.
12. Karamian, Mark M.; Golovan, Stanislav A. "THE GREAT ACADEMIC DICTIONARY OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE". Academia.edu. Retrieved 16 August 2016.
13. Entry at Amazon. Amazon.com. Retrieved 17 August 2016.
14. "Presentación" (in Spanish). Real Academia Española. Retrieved 6 August 2016.
15. "Structure and history of the Dutch language". Free University of Berlin, Department for Dutch Linguistics. September 14, 2009. Retrieved June 26, 2011.
16. "Online edition of the 15 volumes of The (Explanatory) Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language (in Bulgarian)". many publishers, primarily The Academic Publishing House of The Institute for the Bulgarian Language. Retrieved October 29, 2016.
17. Shouhui Zhao, Dongbo Zhang, The Totality of Chinese Characters – A Digital Perspective Archived July 16, 2011, at the Wayback Machine.
18. Daniel G. Peebles, SCML: A Structural Representation for Chinese Characters, May 29, 2007
19. Victor H. Mair, Who Has the Biggest Dictionary?, October 9, 2008
20. Victor Mair, Who Has the Biggest Dictionary?, 9 October 2008