sjm:

In reply to:

Prove that, please.

I'll have a little time on my hands tonight, so I'll go proof-hunting on google. However, my information comes from several linguistics courses plus an article I read outside of those courses about the general topic of vocabulary. Now my linguistics courses go way back almost thirty years. But the article I read indicated that the English language grows in vocabulary more, too, than any other language. I have never read anything about the word-loss rate v. the word-growth relationship.

But back to way back then: I believe the language that was second in vocabulary--and I find this fact to be surprising--was French.

Also, tsuwm has commented here that there is no way of really knowing how large the English vocabulary is.

Still, it's an interesting topic to consider. I will google tonight, unless someone else already has the proof (or disproof) in hand.