Question: How many distinct words (different root words) are there in the Torah?

Answer: This is a complicated question. Let me give you some basic stats:

• There are 80,000 words (all numbers are rounded) in the Torah
• There are 2000 roots in the entire Bible (RADACK, Book of Roots)
• The concept of Biblical root is not well defined. Some words are perceived as belonging to different roots depending on the scholar classifying them
• In addition to count there is the concept of frequency. Basically about 10,20% of the roots occurring in the Torah occur 70,80% of the time. For example the root Alep Mem Resh (AMR to speak) occurs 600 times in Genesis alone.

There are more detailed studies that can give you

• Roots in the actual Torah
• Frequency of roots in the actual Torah

These studies are useful pedagogically. Suppose you wanted to teach people after school (Talmud Torah) and had limited time. Then a correct pedagogical procedure is to concentrate on those 20% of the verbs that occur 70-80% of the time. As in the example above if you teach a student Aleph Mem Resh then they are familiar with 600 occurrences of the roots in Genesis.

Finally, besides roots, there are “other words” in the Bible (for example, connective words like Gam, RaQ, AF etc).

Russell Jay Hendel;