almost how many words are there in Russian language?

Question

When i saw a dictionary that contains almost three million words Bigg English-Russian Dictionary

Make me wonder to really know how many words are there in Russian language !

Is this the largest dictionary in the world ?

did you know any research on Russian words estimation ?

Russian has some rules on how to produce new words, so the number of possible words is vertually not limited. — Anixx, Aug 11, 2016 at 11:44
To add to Anixx's statement, here is a list of Russian words that correspond to 3 English words "run, ran, running" img1.joyreactor.cc/pics/comment/… The list is long due to various declensions. Additionally, there are words in the language that typically are not included in the dictionary, because their meaning can be deduced from similar words that are already in the dictionary. — Vitaly, Aug 11, 2016 at 14:38
I didn't know so far the Russian words have such flexible architecture from one root ! — Fereydoon Shekofte, Aug 12, 2016 at 5:27
@Vitaly definitely the list omits a lot of words, for instance, all ones with prefixes раз-, под-, вы-, в-, от-, за-, про-, при-, о-. Only у- and с- prefixes included. — Anixx, Aug 12, 2016 at 8:27

user5462user5462 · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-11 12:35:59Z

First, "three million entries" sounds a bit unbelievable.

Russian has ~200K words according to Dal's dictionary (published in 1862, so quite obsolete); more modern dictionary, "Словарь современного русского литературного языка", is supposed to have ~150K entries, but it hasn't been fully published yet.
English is estimated to have ~170K words in current usage, and ~600K words including obsolete.

You can see the comparison of language sizes here: http://www.lingholic.com/how-many-words-do-i-need-to-know-the-955-rule-in-language-learning-part-2/
None of the compared languages has more than 500K words.

Thanks Roux your reply with the included links is definitive... — Fereydoon Shekofte, Aug 12, 2016 at 5:22
Dahl's dictionary is totally obsolete, even for then-modern language when it was composed. It includes a lot of dialectal and archaic words which were already very archaic by 1862. — Anixx, Aug 12, 2016 at 8:22

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