How Many Words Are There in English, French, Dutch, German, and Scottish Gaelic

It’s not who has the most words, but who uses them most flexibly.

People often ask how many words a language has, as if that number alone could tell us how “rich” or “complex” the language is. The truth is trickier — and far more interesting.

Let’s start with some rough figures:

• English – around 600,000 to 1 million words, depending on whether you count technical, regional, and obsolete terms. English borrows heavily from Latin, French, and Germanic roots, which makes its vocabulary famously broad.

  
  

• French – approximately 100,000 to 150,000 words in modern use. French vocabulary is tightly regulated by L’Académie Française, which tends to preserve clarity and resist uncontrolled borrowing.

  
  

• Dutch – roughly 250,000 to 300,000 words. Dutch is efficient and compound-friendly, often forming long new words instead of importing foreign ones.

  
  

• German – around 300,000 to 400,000 words, though its combinatory power makes that almost meaningless. One can join nouns endlessly (Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän is just the start).

  
  

• Scottish Gaelic – around 35,000 to 60,000 words documented in modern dictionaries, but each carries a wide range of meanings and idiomatic use. The oral tradition and regional variations multiply nuance far beyond the countable vocabulary.

  
  

The Illusion of Size

Counting words is less about quantity and more about structure. English has a huge storehouse of words, but also an extraordinary degree of synonym overlap. French, by contrast, prefers precision and shared norms — fewer synonyms, more agreed usage. German and Dutch rely on compounding and morphology to expand meaning on the fly. Gaelic’s strength lies in contextual economy: the same word flexes its meaning through tone, grammar, and relational use.

Who Relies Most on Context?

• English allows ambiguity but often compensates with syntax — word order and prepositions carry much of the meaning.

  
  

• French tends to encode relationships formally (gender, agreement, tense), leaving less to context.

  
  

• German uses case endings to show who’s doing what, which adds grammatical clarity even in long sentences.

  
  

• Dutch sits somewhere between English and German — less inflection, more reliance on context, but still structurally clear.

  
  

• Scottish Gaelic stands out: context is king. Word meaning, lenition, and prepositional phrases shift depending on who’s speaking, to whom, and about what. A single word like air can mean “on,” “about,” “because of,” or “after,” depending entirely on surrounding words.

  
  

The Real Question

So it’s not who has the most words, but who uses them most flexibly. English wins for volume. German for structural invention. Gaelic for interpretive depth.

A good communicator in any of these languages doesn’t just know the words — they read the air between them.