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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: What is a byte
Message-ID: <8409@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Aug-87 12:08:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8409
Posted: Fri Aug 14 12:08:35 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Aug-87 12:08:35 EDT
References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <34@piring.cwi.nl>, <1549@frog.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 16
Keywords: 32 bit bytes!  You ain't seen nothin', yet.

> In the English dictionary that the documentation department here uses, there
> are 320,000 words.  I am told that the Oxford English Dictionary has
> approaching 1,000,000 words, and that the the total English language has just
> over 1,000,000 words.  Chinese is probably about the same.

Remember that the OED includes an awful lot of words that are obsolete or
terminally obscure by anyone's standards.  It is not a dictionary of current
English.

I would also wonder about the assumption that Chinese would be about the
same size.  I have heard it said that English has the largest vocabulary of
any human language by a wide margin, because of its dominant position and
its unusually extensive borrowing from other languages.
-- 
Support sustained spaceflight: fight |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
the soi-disant "Planetary Society"!  | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry