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  1. The number
  2. The numbers online
  3. What is a word
  4. One dictionary, three numbers
  5. The short answer
  6. Questions
  7. Sources

Romanian in numbers

How many words does Romanian have?

It depends what you count. 65,000 if you count what today’s standard dictionary contains, 125,000 if you count everything ever written in Romanian, 175,000 if you also count the variants of those words. Choose below what to count. The numbers in the selector come from the Romanian Academy’s dictionaries.

What are you counting?

over 65,000

entries in the standard dictionary of present-day Romanian

  • 100 words
  • 100 variants
  • up to 175,000
Counted
The words of today’s standard language, with their spelling, pronunciation and grammatical forms. Some regional and old words get in with a label: curechi, a regional word for cabbage, is marked “reg.”.
Not counted
Most of the old language, regional speech and specialist vocabulary. There are no definitions: DOOM shows only how a word is spelled, pronounced and inflected.

DOOM 3 (the Academy’s spelling, pronunciation and grammar dictionary), 2021 edition, Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti Institute of Linguistics. DOOM describes the edition as having “over 3,600 new entries” since DOOM 2 (2005); the online list now has 3,752.

The steps do not fit inside each other. DEX has words that DOOM lacks, and the other way round. Compare the sizes, not the lists.

Where 67,000, 80,000, 120,000 and 150,000 come from

Ask the question in Romanian online and you get at least seven answers. Most are right about what they count. Almost none says what that is.

  1. 65,000+

    DOOM 3 (2021)

    The Academy’s standard dictionary. Its own site says “over 65,000 entries”; the press turned that into “words”.

    Words

  2. 67,000+

    DEX (2016)

    The everyday explanatory dictionary. Antena 1, a national TV channel, wrote that “the number of words in Romanian has reached 67,000”, as if the dictionary were the language.

    Words

  3. 80,000

    A 12-volume illustrated dictionary

    Antena 1 again, attributing it to the Universal Illustrated Dictionary of the Romanian Language (Litera, 2010–2011), which adds specialist terms to the general vocabulary. It is not an Academy dictionary.

    Words

  4. 120,000

    A municipal library’s blog

    Given as “about 120,000” with no dictionary behind it. The nearest sourced number is MDA’s 125,000.

    No source

  5. 125,000

    MDA (2010)

    The words of the historical dictionary, in MDA’s condensed form, without variants. The largest word count with an academic source.

    Words

  6. 150,000

    Romanian Wikipedia

    “About 150,000 words”, with no footnote.

    No source

  7. 175,000

    MDA (2010), then DLR

    Words plus variants. Academy researchers describe the DLR as having over 175,000 entries, variants included; short summaries just say “175,000 words”. MDA counts its own entries explicitly: 125,000 words and 50,000 variants.

    Words + variants

  8. 1,119,631

    dexonline.ro, September 2026

    Active definitions, collected from dozens of dictionaries. The same word appears once for every dictionary that explains it. The public database dump of 3 September has 1,242,747, because it also includes hidden, deleted and unfinished definitions.

    Definitions

For what dexonline counts: the dexonline census (in Romanian) counts 254,055 entries, 320,645 base forms, 1,242,747 definitions and 2,274,323 inflected forms in the public dump. The gap with the 1,119,631 on the site’s home page is status: the home page counts only active definitions.

What counts as a word?

Six cases. Pick an answer, then see how the dictionaries decide.

  1. copil · copii · copilului

    Child, children, of the child. How many words?

    See the answer

    One.

    These are three forms of one word. In the entry counts on this page, grammatical forms are not counted separately. MDA does, though, list two variants of copil, each on its own line: cupil and coapilă.

    DOOM 3; MDA, 2nd edition (2010), via dexonline.ro

  2. ghips · gips

    Both mean plaster. Two words?

    See the answer

    One word and a variant.

    In MDA, gips has a line that points to ghips: it is one of the 50,000 variants. That is how MDA reaches 175,000 entries with only 125,000 words. DOOM 3 has the entry ghips.

    MDA, 2nd edition (2010); DOOM 3, via dexonline.ro

  3. curechi (cabbage)

    A regional word. Does it count?

    See the answer

    Yes, even in today’s standard.

    DOOM 3 lists it with the label “reg.”. MDA has it too, along with the variant curec. Regional words are in all the Academy’s dictionaries; only the number differs.

    DOOM 3; MDA, 2nd edition (2010), via dexonline.ro

  4. ministră

    A woman minister. A separate word from ministru?

    See the answer

    Yes.

    DOOM 3 gives it an entry separate from ministru, as it does președintă (woman president). The plural miniștri is only a form and is not counted.

    DOOM 3 (2021), via dexonline.ro

  5. a lucra · lucrare · lucrător

    To work, a piece of work, a worker. How many words?

    See the answer

    Three.

    They are related words, each with its own meaning. An etymological dictionary may group them into one family, a “lexical nest”, but counts them separately. There are far fewer families than words.

    The principle is shown below, with the DELR’s numbers.

  6. 1,119,631

    That is how many definitions dexonline.ro, an online collection of Romanian dictionaries, holds. Is that 1.1 million words?

    See the answer

    No.

    The site collects dozens of dictionaries, and an ordinary word appears in many of them. Copil appears in DEX, in MDA, in DOOM, in Scriban’s 1939 dictionary and in others.

    dexonline.ro, home page, September 2026

One dictionary, three numbers

The new Etymological Dictionary of Romanian (DELR), published online by the Institute of Linguistics, has reached the letters A–E. For those five letters it gives three numbers, from the same material.

36,657words
20,329variants
10,479word families

Add the words and the variants and you say “almost 57,000”. Count the families and you say “about 10,000”. Both describe the same five letters correctly. Lexicographers give the numbers separately so that they are not confused.

The short answer, to copy

In shortRomanian has no official word count. The standard dictionary, DOOM 3, has over 65,000 entries. The Little Academic Dictionary, the condensed form of the Academy’s historical dictionary, has 125,000 words and another 50,000 variants. The 175,000 often quoted adds the words and the variants together.

Questions

How many words are in DEX?

The 2016 edition has over 67,000 words. It is the everyday dictionary: it explains the current vocabulary and includes many regional and archaic words, but far fewer than the historical dictionary. The Little Academic Dictionary, its condensed form, has 125,000 words.

How many words are in DOOM 3, and how many are new?

Over 65,000 entries, according to the official site, doom.lingv.ro. The DOOM site speaks of “over 3,600 new entries” since DOOM 2, from 2005; the online list of new words now has 3,752.

Are variants counted as separate words?

The Academy counts them separately from words: MDA has 125,000 words and 50,000 variants. The 175,000 total often quoted for Romanian adds them together.

Are regional words included?

The historical dictionary includes every attested one: the DLR covers folk and regional speech alongside the old and the technical language. DOOM 3 includes only some, labelled “reg.”.

Can anyone know exactly how many words Romanian has?

No. A dictionary counts the words its lexicographers found in the texts they read, up to the date of printing. Meanwhile new words come into use and others drop out. Each dictionary gives an exact number for what it covers; the language itself has none.

Sources

  1. Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti Institute of Linguistics, about the institute (in Romanian): MDA, “125,000 words and 50,000 variants”.
  2. Univers Enciclopedic Gold, Micul dicționar academic, vols I–II (2010): “175,000 entries, of which 125,000 are words proper and 50,000 lexical variants”, covering “all the words and variants in the Thesaurus Dictionary”.
  3. Romanian Academy, Gabriela Haja on the Academy’s dictionaries: DLR, “175,000 words and over 1,000,000 quotations”, a phrasing that counts the variants as words. Elena Isabelle Tamba, on the digitisation of Romanian lexicography: “more than 175,000 entries (with variants)”; DOOM 3, “over 65,000 entries”.
  4. Institute of Linguistics, foreword to the DLR: the scope of the historical dictionary (literary, folk and regional language, old and current texts, technical and scientific fields).
  5. Institute of Linguistics, DOOM 3 online: “over 65,000 entries”.
  6. Edupedu, DOOM 3 is fully online (August 2023): the online launch. Institute of Linguistics, What is new in DOOM 3: “over 3,600 new entries”, and the list of new words (3,752 results, September 2026); General principles: a word’s absence “does not necessarily mean” it is inadmissible.
  7. Romanian Academy, The Thesaurus Dictionary of the Romanian Language, and the publisher Univers Enciclopedic: DEX 2016, over 67,000 words.
  8. Institute of Linguistics, Etymological Dictionary of Romanian (DELR), letters A–E: 36,657 words, 20,329 variants, 10,479 lexical nests.
  9. dexonline.ro: 1,119,631 active definitions (home page, September 2026; the source code counts only the status “active”); public dump of 3 September 2026: 1,242,747 definition rows, of which 1,118,051 active; the entries for copil, ghips, gips, curechi, ministră, președintă from MDA2 and DOOM 3.
  10. The numbers online: Antena 1 (67,000, 80,000; the dictionary’s correct title, per Cărturești: Dicționar universal ilustrat al limbii române); Radu Rosetti Municipal Library, Onești (120,000); Romanian Wikipedia, “Vocabularul limbii române” (150,000).