1260: English's Mysterious Abundance of Synonyms May 23, 2018

Arguably, English has more words that any other language, though this is not to say that English speakers use more distinct words than other peoples. A common, though overstated, reason for this is that there are so many loan words, and words of foreign origin, but this only goes so far. For instance, the fact that English has an abundance of both Germanic and Romantic vocabulary might explain why there are 'big' and 'large' (which when originally adopted from French meant 'wide; long'), but this does not account for 'small' and 'little' (and questionably 'tiny') which are Germanic.
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