Does English only need 850 words? This guy thought so.

Granted, "sweat" became "face water"...

The guy who tried to edit English

(Image credit: (John Patrick Thomas/Courtesy Mental Floss))

How many words are there in English? It depends on how you count them — do run and running count as separate words? What about run [a footrace] and run [for office]? A good conservative estimate is 250,000. The English lexicon is not only huge, it's also full of words that mean practically the same thing. Get, obtain, procure, acquire. Shine, gleam, glow,shimmer, sparkle. Do we really need them all?

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Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, a history of the attempt to build a better language. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon. Follow her on Twitter.