English Vocabulary Elements. William R. Leben, Brett Kessler, and Keith Denning, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925475.003.0001
One
The Wealth of English
WORD POWER AND A WORLD POWER
In the number of speakers who learn it as a first or second language, and in its range of uses and adaptability to general and specific tasks, English is the world’s most important language today. It is the mother tongue of several hundred million people. Its rich verbal art, great works in science and scholarship, and major role in international commerce and culture have made English the most frequently taught second language in the world.
English is not the first language of as many individuals as Mandarin Chinese. But it is spoken over a much vaster area. In North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, it is the official language of many nations, including some where English is not most people’s first language. Native speakers of English number about 5 percent of the world’s population, yet over 60 percent of websites are in English.
A history of political importance as well as a certain linguistic suppleness has endowed English with an enormous vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary contains 476,000 words, and these do include the many technical terms that appear only in specialized dictionaries for particular fields or recent neologisms, not to mention all the regular plural forms of nouns, the different present and past tense forms of verbs, and other words derived from these words.
The size of the English vocabulary has some wonderful advantages. Although it may be true that any concept can be expressed in any language,