title_body: How many words should I create in a conlang? Question 1: How many words are minimal for a naturalistic conlang? (1000, 1500, 3000 or even more)
  
  Question 2: How many words do the conlangers usually create?
upvoted_answer: The answer to both of these questions lies somewhere between &quot;it depends&quot; and &quot;let's speculate a little&quot;.
  
  The act of inventing a naturalistic language does not necessarily mean that you must also create a naturalistically large lexicon. After all, it's the grammar, the syntax, the usability in a wide variety of normal contexts that determines naturalism.  A natural language might have anywhere between 15000 and 1,000,000 words. And as you can see from the several English entries, there's not even a consensus as to how many words there are in a language. The number of words you should create is entirely up to you. A more interesting question, interesting in the broad sense of course!, is how many words is enough words to create? This is not only more interesting to consider, but also harder to answer because there is no pat response and any answer given will be purely opinion.
  I'd argue that 2000 is a bare bones lower estimation, given that this is the lexicon size for Basic English. But B.E. isn't exactly &quot;naturalistic&quot;, so that figure is undoubtedly low. Somewhere between 3000 and 6000 gives you a little more than dry bones to gnaw on!, but still hardly approaches the naturalism of a natural language, to say nothing of the works of the more gung ho kind of lexicophilic glossopoets!
  
  As for the second question, we do have some recent figures. The results of a recent survey of language inventors determined a spread of approximately 500 (+/-) to &gt;5,000 over 246 respondents. Of note are the lowest and highest categories, with about 70% of respondents falling into the &lt;500 &amp; &gt;5000 categories. The remaining 30% fall between 500 and 5000 words.