Joshalyne Parish, age 11, of Cleveland, Ohio, for her question:

How many words are in the English language?

A new word is invented to name every new invention    and this sort of thing goes on every week. For this reason, we cannot give the exact number of words in the English language. According to the latest estimate, there are about 600,000 of them. Thousands of them are technical terms known only to specialists in this or that branch of science. No one person knows and understands them all and most people know less than a quarter of them.

English is the second most popular language in the world. About 250 million people use it as their native tongue. Another 150 million use English as a second language and about 100 million more know enough English words and phrases to go shopping in New York. The only language spoken by more people is Chinese.