This is a list of dictionaries considered authoritative or complete by approximate number of total words, or headwords, included. Figures do not take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective) and homographs. Although it is possible to count the number of entries in a dictionary, it is not possible to count the number of words in a language.[1] [2] In compiling a dictionary, a lexicographer decides whether the evidence of use is sufficient to justify an entry in the dictionary. This decision is not the same as determining whether the word exists.
The green background means a given dictionary is the largest in a given language.
Language | Approx. no. of headwords | Approx. no. of definitions | Dictionary | Notes | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tamil | Sorkuvai | An online open dictionary run by the Tamil Nadu government.[3] | |||
Korean | Urimalsaem | Online open dictionary run by South Korean government, including North Korean dialects(66,172 words).[4] | |||
Portuguese | Aulete Digital | Online dictionary including expressions.[5] | |||
Finnish | RedFox Pro | Online dictionary. The free version has over 300,000 Finnish words and the Pro version has over 800,000 Finnish words. The dictionary has agglomerated other dictionaries, such as technical ones,[6] and the largest set comes from Wordnet.[7] This dictionary essentially does not include inflections. | |||
English | 1,439,188 | English Wiktionary | Contains 780,489 gloss entries and 1,439,188 total definitions.[8] [9] | ||
Swedish | Svenska Akademiens ordbok, Swedish Academy | After having completed letters A through T SAOB included 470,000 words, but 600,000 words when the alphabet was completed in 2017. | |||
Korean | Standard Korean Language Dictionary[10] | Contains 511,282 entries. | |||
Italian | Grande Dizionario Hoepli Italiano[11] [12] | The number of "sayable and writable" word-forms is estimated at over 2 million[13] | |||
Japanese | Nihon Kokugo Daijiten[14] | ||||
Lithuanian | Lietuvių kalbos žodynas (Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian) | 22,000 pages in 20 volumes with quotations from all kinds of writing and dialect records between 1547 and 2001. Accessible online at www.lkz.lt.[15] | |||
English | Webster's Third New International Dictionary and Addenda Section | Contains 470,000 entries[16] | |||
Northern Kurdish | Kurdish Wiktionary | Contains 411,864 entries with all conjugations of words in Northern Kurdish among a total of 1,000,051 entries, including words from other languages that are not found in Kurdish.[17] | |||
French | French Wiktionary | Contains more than 408,000 lemma, associated to more than 636,500 definitions and 1,880,500 inflections, distributed other 1,924,200 entries. | |||
Serbo-Croatian | Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika | Published from 1880 to 1976 in 97 fascicles collected into 23 volumes under the auspices of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, estimated at a minimum of 400,000 words by Dragica Malić.[18] [19] Includes only words found in the Shtokavian dialect; words from Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects are excluded. | |||
Dutch | Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal | The 43 volumes of the WNT (including three supplements) consist of 49,255 pages, describing Dutch words from 1500 to 1976.[20] | |||
Chinese | Hanyu Da Cidian | The 3rd edition of the digital version contains 18,014 single-character words, 336,706 compound words, 23,383 idioms (chengyu), 504,040 definitions, and 861,956 examples.[21] | |||
English | The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition | In the introduction to the 4th and 5th editions, it is mentioned that more than 10,000 words have been added, thus the total for the 5th edition will be more than 370,000 words.[22] | |||
Finnish | Suomen murteiden sanakirja (in progress) | Suomen murteiden sanakirja (SMS) will include 350,000 words from different dialects, with well-documented definitions, based on the archives (Suomen murteiden sana-arkisto) of 400,000 words, with over 8 million definitions.[23] [24] | |||
Persian | Dehkhoda Dictionary, 1998, | The original series initially consisted of 3 million records (Persian: فیش (French: fiche) or Persian: برگه "barge") (up to 100 meanings/records for each word or proper noun) until Dehkhoda's death in March 1956, and currently contains 343,466 entries that, according to the latest digital release of the dictionary by Tehran University Press (version 3.0) are based on an ever-growing library of over 2300 volumes in lexicology and various other scientific fields.[25] [26] | |||
Norwegian | Norsk Ordbok | The finished dictionary has about 330,000 headwords, whereas the corpus it's built upon contains about 500,000 words in total.[27] | |||
German | Deutsches Wörterbuch | 330,000 words in use since the mid-fifteenth century.[28] | |||
Turkish | Ötüken Türkçe Sözlük[29] | Turkish dictionary (Old and Middle Turkic, Ottoman and Modern Turkish), includes 316,000 entries.[30] | |||
Dutch | Etymologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands[31] | ||||
Norwegian | Tanums store rettskrivningsordbok (10. utgave) | A dictionary of orthography. | |||
Ukrainian | Український лексикон кінця XVIII — початку XXI ст.: словник-індекс: у 3-х томах | Лексичний словник.[32] | |||
Urdu | 823,743 | Rekhta Dictionary[33] | Rekhta Dictionary, an initiative of Rekhta Foundation is a multi-lingual dictionary available in three scripts, i.e. Urdu, Devanagari and Roman. | ||
Gujarati | Bhagavadgomandal | 2.81 lakh words and their meanings in 9 volumes. Also serves as an encyclopedia with almost 8.22 lakh words.[34] | |||
Romanian | dexonline | Online dictionary. Project of digitisation of 67 general, specialty and archaic dictionaries. Launched in 2001. As of 2023, it contained over 280,000 unique words and 1,065,000 definitions. | |||
English | 600,000 | Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition | Oxford Dictionary has 273,000 headwords; 171,476 of them being in current use, 47,156 being obsolete words and around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. The dictionary contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives, and 169,000 phrases and combinations, making a total of over 600,000 word-forms.[35] [36] There is one count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words — but that count presumably includes words such as Latin species names, prefixed and suffixed words, scientific terminology, jargon, foreign words of extremely limited English use and technical acronyms.[37] [38] [39] | ||
Urdu | Urdu Lughat[40] [41] | ||||
Ukrainian | Великий орфографічний словник сучасної української лексики | A dictionary of orthography. Contains 253,000 entries (253,000 words).[42] [43] | |||
Czech | Nine volumes of this dictionary were printed in years 1935–1957. They contain about 250,000 words, their meanings and example usage from literature. The dictionary is available online.[44] [45] | ||||
Serbo-Croatian | Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language | This dictionary is incomplete. So far, 20 volumes of the planned 40 have been published. These 20 volumes contain 241.000 headwords. When complete, this Dictionary will have around 500.000 headwords.[46] | |||
Portuguese | 382,000 | Houaiss Dictionary of the Portuguese Language | 228,000 entries and 382,000 meanings.[47] | ||
Belarusian | Вялікі слоўнік беларускай мовы: арфаграфія, акцэнтуацыя, парадыгматыка[48] | ||||
Russian | 250,000 | Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка | The 3rd edition by Baudouin de Courtenay contains about 250,000 entries (220,000 words and 30,000 proverbs)[49] [50] | ||
Finnish | Nykysuomen sanakirja, 1961 | Nykysuomen sanakirja can be translated to The Dictionary of Modern Finnish or The Dictionary of Contemporary Finnish, but the language can be quite dated; the dictionary only reflects the language as it was no later than 1961. Even though it has been published again, it has not been updated. The dictionary contains over 201,000 headwords in six volumes.[51] For modern language, The New Dictionary of Modern Finnish is more relevant. | |||
German | Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache | Dictionary by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities of over 200,000 contemporary words.[52] | |||
Norwegian (bokmål) | Det Norske Akademis ordbok | The Norwegian Academy Dictionary contains more than 200,000 entries and more than 300,000 literary quotes. Furthermore, it contains fixed expressions and pronunciation.The dictionary is free and edited daily. | |||
Danish | Ordbog over det danske Sprog | Dictionary maintained by the . Covers Danish language use 1700–1950.[53] The society also maintains a sister dictionary, covering language use since 1950. | |||
Slovak | Slovník slovenského jazyka z r. 1959 – 1968, Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka A – G, H – L, M – N z r. 2006, 2011, 2015 | Here is the information about the number of words in Slovak written by Jazykovedný ústav Ľ. Štúra SAV. | |||
Tibetan | Rangjung Yeshe Dharma Dictionary | Considering the large number of Buddhist terminology, colloquial expressions and modern literary Tibetan neologisms not included in this dictionary, the actual total number is probably about twice the number of terms included on this website (195,919), perhaps 375–400,000 Tibetan words in total.[54] | |||
Sanskrit | Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 1899 (IITS Koelin) | The work of Monier Monier-Williams, who as a Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. [55] [56] | |||
Hindi | Hindi Wiktionary | A free dictionary that gives everyone the right to edit.[57] | |||
Kazakh | 15 томдық "Қазақ тілінің түсіндірме сөздігі" | Explanatory dictionary of the Kazakh language[58] | |||
English | 207,016 | WordNet, 3.1 | WordNet's latest Online-version is 3.1. The database contains 155,327 words organized in 175,979 synsets for a total of 207,016 word-sense pairs.[59] | ||
Romanian | DLR | Dicționarul Limbii Române | |||
Belarusian | Слоўнік беларускай мовы[60] | ||||
Icelandic | Orðabók Blöndals[61] | The dictionary contains 150,000 headwords in 17 volumes.[62] | |||
Russian | Большой академический словарь русского языка | Great Academy Dictionary of Russian language[63] | |||
Swiss German | Schweizerisches Idiotikon[64] | The dictionary contains 150,000 words from the late Middle Ages to today.[65] | |||
German | Duden – Die deutsche Rechtschreibung | The most influential dictionary in Germany, a dictionary of orthography.[66] | |||
Polish | Wielki słownik ortograficzny PWN | Big orthography dictionary PWN contains new words, proper nouns and latest spelling changes. | |||
German | German Wiktionary | Contains 141,154 german gloss entries[67] [68] | |||
French | Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé | ATILF[69] (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française – Computer Processing and Analysis of the French Language) 135,000 (Larousse Dictionnaire de français, published by Editions Larousse)[70] [71] | |||
Ukrainian | Словник української мови (The Dictionary of the Ukrainian language) | The dictionary was finished in late 1970s - early 1980s[72] [73] | |||
Dutch | Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal (Het Groene Boekje)[74] | ||||
Russian | Большой толковый словарь русского языка | Great Dictionary of Russian language[75] | |||
Swedish | Rikstermbanken[76] | Sweden's national term bank.[77] | |||
Indonesian | Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, 5th edition, 2016 | ||||
Swedish | Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL)[78] | Normative Swedish language spelling dictionary, which includes only commonly used words, currently includes ~126,000 words,[79] after having added 13,500 and removed 9,000 in its latest edition, SAOL 14, plus an additional 200,000 still encountered words in earlier editions.[80] [81] | |||
Eastern Armenian | Ժամանակակից հայոց լեզվի բացատրական բառարան | Žamanakakic' hayoc' lezvi bac'atrakan baṙaran[82] | |||
Tamil | University of Madras Tamil Lexicon | The dictionary includes 124,405 separate entries.[83] | |||
Arabic | Muʻjam al-Riyāḍ lil-lughah al-ʻArabīyah al-muʻāṣirah | Contains 145,000 meanings. | |||
Malaysian | Kamus Dewan Perdana, 1st Edition, 2020 | ||||
Arabic | Taj al-ʿArus Min Jawahir al-Qamus | The dictionary includes 120,000 entries filling 40 volumes, whereby one entry comprises dozens of words.[84] | |||
Frisian | Het Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal[85] | Dictionary of New Frisian (Nieuwfries) from 1800 to 1975[86] | |||
Finland Swedish | Ordbok över Finlands svenska folkmål[87] (in progress) | The dictionary includes around 120,000 headwords.[88] | |||
Bulgarian | Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language (monolingual academic explanatory dictionary), (Многотомен) Речник на българския език in Bulgarian, in 15+ volumes | This dictionary covers vocabulary from the last 150 years of Bulgarian and is compiled and edited by linguistics (primarily native lexicographers and lexicologists) from The Institute for the Bulgarian Language (part of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). It includes basic, commonly used, literary, colloquial, dialectical, archaic and obsolete Bulgarian words, as well as some specialized terminology. The latest volume (15th) published in 2015 ends with headwords beginning with the (Bulgarian Cyrillic) letter Р.[89] | |||
French | Le Dictionnaire universel francophone (DUF)[90] | Dictionary published by Hachette[91] | |||
Georgian | ქართული ენის განმარტებითი ლექსიკონი (Explanatory dictionary of the Georgian language) | The electronic version of this Dictionary, consisting of 129755 records, is the joint project of Arnold Chikobava Institute of Linguistics and Language Modeling Association. The project was financed by Rustaveli Foundation.[92] | |||
Belarusian | Skarnik | . Belarusian-Russian online dictionary contains 112,462 words.[93] | |||
Slovene | Slovar slovenskega knjižnega jezika, Second edition, 2014 | The official dictionary of modern Slovene is Slovar slovenskega knjižnega jezika (SSKJ; Standard Slovene Dictionary). It was published in five volumes by Državna Založba Slovenije between 1970 and 1991 and contains more than 100,000 entries and subentries with accentuation, part-of-speech labels, common collocations, and various qualifiers. In the 1990s, an electronic version of the dictionary was published and it is available online.[94] | |||
Finnish | Kielitoimiston sanakirja, 2018 | Online dictionary. Institute for the Languages of Finland (governmental institute) has selected the core vocabulary, and many headwords are not included.[95] | |||
Afrikaans | Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (HAT), 2015 | New 6th edition contains 3228 new keywords and 5365 meaning.[96] | |||
French | Le Grand Robert, 2019 | Contains 100,000 words and 350,000 definitions.[97] | |||
German | Österreichisches Wörterbuch, 2018 | Official dictionary of the German language in the Republic of Austria.[98] | |||
Polish | Słownik języka polskiego PWN | Polish dictionary of PWN contains about 100,000 articles and 145,000 definitions.[99] | |||
Russian | Орфографический словарь русского языка[100] | Normative Russian dictionary,[101] the dictionary includes around 100,000 words.[102] | |||
Turkish |
| Güncel Türkçe Sözlük[103] | Online dictionary of the Turkish Language Association[104] Contains 64,994 words, 33,744 idioms and proverbs and 132,548 meanings. | ||
Turkish |
| Misalli Büyük Türkçe Sözlük (Kubbealtı Lugatı)[105] | Turkish dictionary that is composed of modern and Ottoman Turkish, includes 60,000 entries and 33,000 idioms with around 100,000 examples based on literary works of 840 writers. It's online version is named "Kubbealtı Lugatı".[106] | ||
Spanish | Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española, 23rd edition, 2014[107] | ||||
Central Kurdish | فەرهەنگی زانستگای کوردستان University of Kurdistan Dictionary: Kurdish-Persian, Rohani, M. (2018)[108] | The four volumes of the Kurdish-to-Persian and Persian-to-Kurdish dictionary have 93,000 vocabulary terms. Director Majid Rouhani worked for ten years to complete it.[109] | |||
Spanish | , 2007 | Contains 90,000 keywords and 190,000 meaning. | |||
Dutch | Van Dale, 14th edition, 2005 | [110] | |||
Catalan | 172,000 | Gran Diccionari de la llengua catalana (Great Dictionary of the Catalan language, includes the definitions in the Diccionari de la llengua catalana) | Contains 88,500 headwords and 172,000 definitions.[111] | ||
Chinese | Zhonghua Zihai | The largest character dictionary covering all varieties of Chinese, a compilation of Chinese characters in use over three millennia of written history.[112] [113] [114] | |||
Arabic | المعجم المعاصر2019 | The first version (2019) contains approximately 83,015 entries.[115] [116] | |||
Scots | Dictionaries of the Scots Language | An online dictionary comprising A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (covering the period up to 1700) and The Scottish National Dictionary (from 1700). | |||
Arabic | Lisan Al-Arab | The dictionary includes around 80,000 entries. | |||
French | Dictionnaire de la langue française[117] | Four-volume dictionary[118] of the French language by Émile Littré[119] | |||
Uzbek | Oʻzbek tilining izohli lugʻati (Annotated Dictionary of the Uzbek Language) | The largest Uzbek language dictionary, made of five volumes and including around 80,000 entries.[120] | |||
Middle Dutch | Het [121] | Historical dictionary of Middle Dutch: 1250-1550[122] | |||
Romanian | Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române (Published by the Romanian Academy) | ||||
Tamazight | Amawal Ameqran, Abdelhafed Idres. 2017 | ||||
Swedish | Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien (Svensk ordbok, SO)[123] | The dictionary includes around 65,000 headwords. | |||
Punjabi | Mahan Kosh | First published in 1930, the dictionary includes 64,263 entries in Gurmukhi script. It has been republished many times.[124] [125] [126] [127] | |||
Swedish | Ordbok öfver svenska språket (Dalin Ordbok)[128] | The dictionary includes around 64,000 headwords.[129] | |||
Arabic | Al-Qamus al-Muhit wa al-Qabus al-Wasit | The dictionary includes around 60,000 entries.[130] | |||
Dutch | Groot Woordenboek Afrikaans en Nederlands[131] | Dutch-Afrikaans dictionary[132] | |||
Turkish | Osmanlıca-Türkçe Ansiklopedik Lûgat[133] | Ottoman Turkish dictionary, includes 60,000 entries.[134] | |||
Galician | Dicionario da Real Academia Galega (Dictionary of the Royal Galician Academy)[135] | ||||
Western Armenian | Հայոց լեզուի նոր բառարան | Hayoc' lezowi nor baṙaran[136] | |||
Tatar | Татарско-русский словарь Ш.Н. Асылгараева, Ф.А. Ганиева, М.З. Закиева, К.М. Миннуллина, Д.Б. Рамазанова | Tatar-Russian dictionary of Sh.N. Asylgaraev, F.A. Ganiev, M.Z. Zakiyev, K.M. Minnullin, D.B. Ramazanova[137] | |||
French | Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (DAF) | Normative French dictionary,[138] once complete, it will contain 55,000 words[139] | |||
Dutch | Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal[140] | Normative Dutch dictionary,[141] the dictionary includes around 52,000 entries and around 134.000 derivative words.[142] | |||
Dutch | Het Groene woordenboek - Handwoordenboek Nederlands[143] | ||||
Turkmen | Türkmen diliniň düşündirişli sözlügi | Turkmen Explanatory Dictionary[144] | |||
Lakota (Lakȟóta) | New Lakota Dictionary | A bilingual Lakota-English and English-Lakota dictionary, book format (editions: 2008, 2011, 2022), mobile app version (2014), desktop version (2015). | |||
Azerbaijani | Azərbaycan dilinin izahlı lüğəti | Azerbaijani Explanatory Dictionary[145] | |||
Syriac | Sureth dictionary | Published by the Association Assyrophile de France, it features Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic words of all dialects.[146] | |||
Icelandic | 560,000 | Orðabók Háskólans | 43,000 basic words and 519,000 compound words of which more than half are attested only once or don't get into print ("instant combinations")[147] | ||
Thai | พจนานุกรม ฉบับราชบัณฑิตยสถาน พ.ศ. ๒๕๕๔ | ||||
Bashkir | Башкирско-русский словарь Ураксин З.Г. | Bashkir-Russian dictionary Uraksin Z. G.[148] | |||
Chuvash | Чувашско-русский словарь Скворцова М. И. | Chuvash-Russian dictionary Skvortsova M. I.[149] | |||
Dargwa | Даргинско-русский словарь Юсупова Х. А. | Dargwa-Russian dictionary of Yusupov H. A[150] | |||
Riksmål | Riksmålsordlisten[151] | Normative dictionary of the non-official Norwegian written language called Riksmål.[152] | |||
Arabic | Taj al-Lugha wa Sihah al-Arabiyya | The dictionary includes around 40,000 entries. | |||
Classical Latin | Oxford Latin Dictionary | Includes 39,589 Classical Latin entries, including borrowings from Greek, Gaulish, other Italic dialects, Sanskrit, and others. There are about: 10,000 adjectives, 2,123 adverbs, 46 conjunctions, 77 interjections, 17,450 nouns, 26 particles, 39 prepositions, 17 pronouns, and 5,986 verbs. The remaining entries are references to other entries (such as alternate spellings or archaic versions), prefixes, suffixes, and terms left untranslated by the original editors.[153] | |||
Avar | Аварско-русский словарь Гимбатова. М. М.[154] | Avar-Russian dictionary of M. M. Gimbatov | |||
Venetian | Dizionario della lingua veneta[155] | Dictionary of Venetian Language[156] of Gianfranco Cavallin[157] | |||
Komi | Большой коми-русский словарь[158] | A reverse Russian-Komi dictionary contains 50722 words.[159] | |||
Lezgi | [160] | Lezgi-Russian dictionary: B. B Talibov, M. M. Gadzhiev | |||
Middle Dutch | Het Vroegmiddelnederlands Woordenboek[161] | Historical dictionary of Middle Dutch: 1200-1300[162] | |||
Old Swedish | Ordbok öfver svenska medeltidsspråket[163] | The dictionary includes around 22,894 headwords in 3 volumes,[164] and with the 2 volume supplement (21,495 headwords) the dictionary includes 44,389 headwords.[165] | |||
Chechen | Чеченско-русский словарь. Алироев, И.А.; Хамидова, З.Х.; Алексеев, М.Е.[166] | Chechen-Russian dictionary. I.A Aliroev., Z.Kh. Khamidova., M.E. Alekseev., | |||
Kabardian | Кабардинско-русский словарь. М. Л. Апажев, Н. А. Багов[167] | Kabardian-Russian dictionary. M. L. Apazhev, N. A. Bagov | |||
Quechua | Diccionario Quechua-Español Lira Jorge | Quechua-Spanish dictionary Lira Jorge[168] | |||
Swedish | Svensk etymologisk ordbok[169] | The dictionary includes around 20,000 headwords.[170] | |||
Esperanto | Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto (Complete Illustrated Dictionary of Esperanto) | 46,890 lexical units[171] | |||
Malayalam | Chathur Dravida Bhasha Nighandu (Dictionary of Four Dravidian Languages)[172] | Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu multilingual dictionary published by Kerala Bhasha Institute and authored by Njattyela Sreedharan.[173] The dictionary includes around 16,000 headwords.[174] | |||
Ingush | Ингушско-русский словарь. М. С. Мургустов.[175] | Ingush-Russian dictionary by M.S. Murgustov. | |||
Nahuatl | Tlahtolxitlauhcayotl: Chicontepec, Veracruz | Huasteca Nahuatl monolingual dictionary with 10 500 entries of which 360 are loanwords, co-authored by John Joseph Sullivan[176] | |||
Old Dutch | Het Oudnederlands Woordenboek[177] | ||||
Flemish-only words | Het Gele Boekje[178] [179] | ||||
Toki Pona | Toki Pona: The Language of Good[180] | A later dictionary added 17 words, bringing the total number of official words to 137. Subsequently, the Lipu Linku dictionary has used the Toki Pona language survey to identify 260 words in use in Toki Pona, though not all are frequently used.[181] [182] [183] |