Total Words Spoken

[David Barrow]

How many words have been spoken by human kind since we developed language?

[WaldoMcFroog]

There is simply no way of knowing this, David! Languages die all the time, and of course, new words come into being. I've no idea how many words are in something like the OED, but I do know that the average woman has a vocabulary of around 7-8,000 words a day, and men considerably less at 2-4,000. There's 6 billion people in the world (very roughly), 52% of which are women. I think the answer would break most calculators!

[mikewith]

This is my favourite language/ linguistics resource on the Internet - with a listing of the 6,800 major extant languages in the world today (and some 41,000 alternate names aand dialects!): http://www.ethnologue.com/ It might not tell you how many words have been spoken, but it gives some idea of how huuuuuuuuge that number would be!