most frequently used words

1.                           the

2.                           of

3.                            and

4.                           a

5.                           to

6.                           in

7.                           is

8.                           you

9.                          that

10.                      it

11.                     he

12.                      was

13.                      for

14.                      on

15.                       are

16.                       as

17.                        with

18.                        his

19.                        they

20.         I

21.                        at

22.                        be

23.                        this

24.                        have

25.                        from

26.                        or

27.                        one

28.                        had

29.                        by

30.                        word

31.                        but

32.                        not

33.                        what

34.                        all

35.                        were

36.                        we

37.                        when

38.                        your

39.                        can 

40.          said

41.                        there

42.                        use

43.                        an

44.                        each

45.                        which

46.                        she

47.                        do

48.                        how

49.                        their

50.                        if

51.                        will

52.                        up

53.                        other

54.                        about

55.                        out

56.                        many

57.                        then

58.                        them

59.                        these

60.         so

61.            some

62.            her

63.           would

64.          make

65.          like

66.          him

67.          into

68.          time

69.          has

70.          look

71.          two

72.          more

73.          write

74.          go

75.          see

76.          number

77.          no

78.          way

79.          could

80.         people

81.                      my

82.                      than

83.                      first

84.                      water

85.                      been

86.                      call

87.                      who

88.                      oil

89.                      its

90.                      now

91.                      find

92.                      long

93.                      down

94.                      day

95.                      did

96.                      get

97.                      come

98.                      made

99.                      may

100.                  part

Is it true that English has the most words of any language?

   This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons explained in the answer to How many words are there in the English language? However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.

    The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.

    English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore 'agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'.

How many words are there in the English language?

How many words are there in the English language?   There is no single sensible answer to this question. It's impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it's so hard to decide what actually counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (e.g. dogs = plural noun, dogs = present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together? Is hot dog really two words, since it might also be written as hot-dog or even hotdog?

It's also difficult to decide what counts as 'English'. What about medical and scientific terms? Latin words used in law, French words used in cooking, German words used in academic writing, Japanese words used in martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Teenage slang? Abbreviations?

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).

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.