Shell can only 1000 args and if you exceeded it, you would end as error. For doing large number or words/strings match, we need to input words/strings in a file and grep it later. But the consuming time is raising largely after 1000.
Number or words
time
1000
0m1.954s
2000
0m4.825s
5000
0m26.232s
Though, you can match thousands of words in a time, but you don’t have too or it doesn’t deserve it. In this time, a loop would much faster than single threads grep.