How many words are there in Chinese?

[singer]

It is estimated in English there are about 600,000 words. With the construction of large corpora, can we try to estimate the amount of Chinese words in Chinese?

 

[xiaoz]

回复: How many words are there in Chinese?

My corpus of 50 million words (70 million Chinese characters) gives the following figures:

84,883 word types (different word forms)
108,303 word types (different word forms and usages)

 

[singer]

Re: 回复: How many words are there in Chinese?

My corpus of 50 million words (70 million Chinese characters) gives the following figures:

84,883 word types (different word forms)
108,303 word types (different word forms and usages)

In one book whose name is forgotten, the author estimated there are 85,000 words (word types) in Chinese. So the result is very close to Dr.Xiao's.

 

[清风出袖]

another point is that there are a lot of more Chinese chararcters that have long lost their vitality with the passing of time. probably 85000 is only the ones currently available in the modern Chinese.