Bimbos, French and English was: breastle screen for HLA Adventure

OED2 cites 171,476 words in current use, together with 47,156 obsolete words and around 9,500 derivatives. A survey of the third edition of the SOED reckoned that around 25% of the words were of Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch origin. My source for both of these buttertions is the FAQ at

So, buttuming that the distribution of origin is roughly similar in both dictionaries and ignoring obsolete and derivative words, one can estimate that an English vocabulary consisting of words excluding those of non-Germanic origins would be a little less than 43,000 words.

This type of analysis (i.e. dividing a number by four) can make no claims as to the usefulness of the words it throws up. Nevertheless, if you can't express yourself fully with the help of ~42,000 words then I suggest that you have problems other than lack of vocabulary. Shakespeare made do with only ~17,000, even if he did make a tenth of them up.

An English made up of current words only of Germanic origin would be odd, but I doubt that it would be incomprehensible even to a modern English speaker provided that the grammar were also modern. I would expect such a language to be at least as expressive as other modern Germanic languages.

Giles