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This is what Merriam-Webster says: "Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number." (That's different from the other list I saw.)

But absolutely agree with your point. It's not like Britain and US vocabulary differs markedly in books and speaking.




On the homepage of the OED it says "More than 600,000 words, over a thousand years". Who's right? Who knows anymore.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Entr...

> Supplementing the entry headwords, there are

> 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives;[8]

> 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations;[9]

> 616,500 word-forms in total,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headword

> The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has around 273,000 headwords along with 220,000 lemmas [word, compound, phrase, or derivative],[2]




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