there are about 1000000 total words in english and the longest sentence ever (that doesn’t go on infinitely) is 13955 words long. so, how many possible sentences are there?
i am not able to calculate this, but could anyone calculate how many possible sentences there are? the restraints being that each sentence must be grammatically correct and cannot be more than 13955 words long. and the sentence can be as short as one word as long as it is grammatically correct…?
Acording to Google’s unavoidable AI: There are approximately \(10^{83,730}\) possible English sentences. This number—a 1 followed by over 83,000 zeros—is calculated by raising your 1,000,000-word vocabulary to the 13,955th power, which represents all possible combinations for a sentence of that maximum length.
Good point. Although AI seems to be quite fastidious with grammar if nothing else. Can an ungrammatical sentence be considered a sentence? It could be argued that it’s just a bunch of words strung together.
yes. but i’m more curious about grammatically correct sentences. if ai cannot figure it out however, would you like to join me in looking through every single possible sentence and checking whether they are correct or not?
No. And I disagree. An ungrammatical ‘sentence’ makes no sense, therefore it’s just a bunch of random words strung together. Grammar is how you construct a sentence. Without it you only have words.
its a very lovely day today. that sentence i just wrote is grammatically incorrect, but you still understand what i wrote. so at what point does a sentence become a legible sentence vs just a bunch of words?
It’s not grammatically incorrect. It’s missing a capital letter and an apostrophe for some reason. When I see someone writing like that I don’t bother reading it anyway, so it might as well be random words strung together.
That doesn’t seem to me to be the right way to calculate possible English sentences. I wouldn’t call any random sequence of words an “English sentence”.
Carrots weasel single time wrote plop yet to rhyme plonk fink don’t arrive so reverb even in on our.
Is that an English sentence?
Edit. Looks like I was beaten to the punch on that point, we all agree.
It’s constantly changing, new words come into and out of common use all the time. Does it matter that much that you’ll really spend the rest of your life thinking about it? It’s a big number. Who cares if it’s 10^324234 or 10^45438746 ? What difference does it make to you what the specific number is?
I feel like it’s satisfying enough knowing “it’s astronomically large” - more specificity than that doesn’t seem particularly useful here.
I also don’t think there’s necessarily a limit to the number of words in a sentence. You can always write a longer sentence by saying ‘…and…’ or other connecting words.
