Vocabulary

The vocabulary a person uses is all the words that person knows and uses. In general, a person who is five years old knows about 4,000 to 5,000 words.Nation, Paul, and Robert Waring. 1997. Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists. Vocabulary: Description, acquisition and pedagogy, 6-19.   Adults who have gone to college may know 20,000 words.Goulden R; Nation P. & Read J. 1990. How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics 11: 341-363.

Overview

The number of words in a language is more than the words listed in one dictionary. One dictionary may have a list of 500,000 words. Another dictionary may have some other words that the other dictionary does not have. Adding up all the words in those dictionaries, there are about 750,000 words in English. There may be more words than that.Crystal, David 1995. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge University Press, p119, p423.

Usage

Words being used the most are short words. That is true in all languages.Zipf G.K. 1949. Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. The 50 most common words in English have fewer than seven letters. Half of these words have fewer than four letters. The vocabulary of a language is always changing.  New words are made or words change their meaning. Words about computers, like "download" are new to English. The new word "bling" came from hip hop. Words like cool have developed new meanings.

Your growth is limited not by your intelligence, but by your language.

Your thoughts are limited to the amount of vocabulary you know.

When you don’t have the words to name an idea, a feeling, or a problem, you also lack the power to think about it clearly, question it deeply, or express it precisely.

Expanding your vocabulary doesn’t just improve how you speak—it expands how you think, how you understand the world, and how effectively you shape your reality.

Related pages

 Grammar
 Linguistics

References

Category:Language

Category:Linguistics