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XML Sitemap Too Big?

Having an XML sitemap is important for SEO, but do I need to limit the pages listed in the file? Here is my situation:

My client wants a high school biology study site. One of the features is the “Word of the day”, which is a specific word, a brief explanation of 2 sentences and a separate explanation of 2-3 paragraphs with pictures. I foresee 250-400 full "words of the day."

There will be an index that allows you to view any of these words that you want, in addition to today's word. In fact, each of the words “great explanation” is a separate page.

My question is: should I make a separate Sitemap entry for XML for each of them? Altogether, this can make the site map more than 400 entries. I tend to do this because my understanding of SEO is that the more you list the elements, the higher the likelihood that they will be indexed.

Thoughts?

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You do not need to worry if you have a small sitemap in just a few hundred URLs. Having more URLs does not make it more likely to index. But do not worry about it. Most likely, they will all be indexed.

You can provide multiple Sitemaps, but each Sitemap you submit must have no more than 50,000 URLs and no more than 10 MB (10 485 760 bytes). If you want, you can compress sitemaps with gzip to reduce bandwidth requirements; however, a sitemap file that was uncompressed should not exceed 10 MB. If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemaps.

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#index

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