LANGUAGES NEED WAY LESS WORDS THAN YOU THINK

August 14, 2025 - Published

Alright, back to talking about one of my pet peeves.

As someone who's a big fan of minimalistic constructed languages, I see this sentiment said again and again: "This language is too small to be functional for speaking anything more than the most basic subjects!"

Now, let's ignore the fact that this is a completely baseless assumption with no real studies backing it up. Let's ignore the fact that it would be literally impossible to draw a line between what is a sufficient amount of words that are required for a language to be "usable". Let's also ignore the fact that toki pona, a language with only 130 words, has already been used to describe subjects like Non-Euclidean geometry with no issue other than being kind of long (which let's be honest, explaining that in English would also be kind of long).

Let's ignore ALL of that, for no other reason than to prove my point with a much simpler question that anyone can comprehend.

Where do new words come from?

Other than possibly the most basic fundamental words in a language, words do not just pop up out of existence. When a language decides to "make a new word," what usually happens is that a word is either made from other words in the language, or it's borrowed from another language. I am, of course, referring to words that are actually used and can be considered a part of a language's vocabulary, not those random words that pop up and are forgotten in a month.

This means that the majority of new words that are invented are invented from EXISTING words. We can see this very easily from something like Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year.

From the last several years, we have the words "brain rot," "rizz," "goblin mode," and "vax." These are very informal, but they're very clearly not made up from nothing. "Brain rot" and "goblin mode" just combine 2 existing words to create a new concept, while "rizz" and "vax" are just short for "charisma" and "vaccine" respectively.

However, I can tell that you're not impressed -- these are just recent words in a language estimated to have upwards of one million words, of course we don't need to invent any new words from scratch. How about a word whose first usage is in 1598, before the United states was even considered a country: "impressive."

The word refers to a very specific type of significance -- the synonyms Merriam-Webster gives can't even capture the specific meaning it gives off, with "emotional" and "exciting". However, we just look at the etymology and it's exactly what you would expect.

"Impressive" is im- + press + -ive, with "impress" literally meaning to "press in". Essentially, to impress someone with an action means to figuratively imprint that action (or the memory of that action) onto them. This is another very common source of word evolution, where more abstract concepts are explained metaphorically through more concrete concepts.

What about more basic words? Well, I COULD tell you that the English word for "bat" (the animal) is most likely a variation of Middle English's "bakke" which is probably a corruption of Old Swedish's "nattbakka" that may be related to an Old English compound combining "night" and "watch," but I could ALSO tell you that the German word for "bat" is just "Fledermaus" whose etymology is probably exactly what you think it is.

So, if my rambling is getting you off track, let me summarize. The majority of words in any language, no matter how complicated or fanciful or specific, can be made using existing words and affixes.

This can be through logical compounds (e.g. "rowboat"), using words metaphorically to describe new concepts (e.g. "superfluous" literally means "overflowing"), or borrowing words from other languages which can just be translated directly or into a more logical set of words (e.g. "mortgage" actually just means "death pledge", but we could use something less, uh, grave).

If you combine all of those together... you realize there's really no logical reason that a language MUST have over a million words! You can have a rich vocabulary that can express many things, and have a fascinating etymology, without resorting to just making up hundreds of thousands of unique root words.

The argument that a language can't be fully functional with less than 10,000 or 5,000 unique root words is bogus to me. Many constructed languages have proven that it works just fine, and I think that it's very possible to have it still be a rich and interesting language at the same time, too. Etymology is fascinating to people even though its basis is almost exclusively on the simple fact that existing words came from other existing words.

And before anyone says anything about me saying otherwise, yes of course languages are cool for having lots of words!! I'm just saying it's not a requirement and that people need to stop saying it's a requirement!!! A language with 50 words is pushing it, sure, but I'm really tired of people acting like a constructed language has to have like 15,000 root words before it's either "actually functional" or "actually interesting".