Answers – The English language by numbers

  • 1) English is the official language in 67 countries.
  • 2) There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.
  • 3) There are 21 consonants in the English alphabet.
  • 4) 365 million people speak English as their first language.
  • 5) The second edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, but it’s impossible to count the number of words in the English language.
  • 6) About 1,000 new words are added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online each year.
  • 7) The first early English dictionary was published in 1604.
  • 8) The Oxford English Corpus contains over 2 billion words.
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