How big is the English language?
That's not an easy question. Samuel Johnson's dictionary contained 43,000
words. The unabridged Random House of 1987 has 315,000.
Webster's Third New International of 1961 contains 450,000. And the revised
Oxford English Dictionary of 1989 has 615,000 entries.
But in fact this only begins to hint at the total.
For one thing, meanings in English are much more various than a bald count of
entry words would indicate. The mouse that scurries across your kitchen floor
and the mouse that activates your personal computer clearly are two quite
separate entities.
Shouldn't they then be counted as two words? And then what about related
forms like mousy, mouse like, and mice? Shouldn't they also count as separate
words? Surely there is a large difference between something that is a mouse and
something that is merely mousy.
And then of course there are all the names of flora and fauna, medical
conditions, chemical substances, laws of physics, and all the other scientific
and technical terms that don't make it into ordinary dictionaries. Of insects
alone, there are 1.4 million named species. Total all these together and you have
—well, no one knows.
But certainly not less than three million.
So how many of these words do we know? Again, there is no simple answer.
Many scholars have taken the trouble (or more probably compelled their
graduate students to take the trouble) of counting the number of words used by
various authors, on the assumption, one supposes, that that tells us something
about human vocabulary. Mostly what it tells us is that academics aren't very
good at counting. Shakespeare, according to Pei and McCrum, had a vocabulary
of 30,000 words, though Pei acknowledges seeing estimates putting the figure a slow as 16, 000. Lincoln Barnett puts it at 20,000 to 25,000. The King James Bible, according to Laird, contains 8,000 words, but
Shipley puts the number at 7,000, while Barnett confidently zeroes in on a figure
of 10, 442. Who knows who's right?
One glaring problem with even the most scrupulous tabulation is that the total
number of words used by an author doesn't begin to tell us the true size of his
vocabulary. I know the meanings of frangible, spiffing, and cutesy-poo, but have
never had occasion to write them before now. A man of Shakespeare's linguistic
versatility must have possessed thousands of words that he never used because
he didn't like or require them. Not once in his plays can you find the words
Bible, Trinity, or Holy Ghost, and yet that is not to suggest that he was not
familiar with them.
Estimates of the size of the average person's vocabulary are even more
contentious. Max Muller, a leading German philologist at the turn of the century,
thought the average farm laborer had an everyday vocabulary of no more than
300 words. Pei cites an English study of fruit pickers, which put the number at
no more than 500, though he himself thought that the figure was probably closer
to 30,000. Stuart Berg Flexner, the noted American lexicographer, suggests that
the average well-read person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and
probably uses about 1,500 to 2,000 in a normal week's conversation. McCrum
puts an educated person's vocabulary at about 15,000.
There are endless difficulties attached to adjudging how many words a person
knows. Consider just one. If I ask you what incongruent means and you say, "It
means not congruent," you are correct. That is the first definition given in most
dictionaries, but that isn't to say that you have the faintest idea what the word
means. Every page of the dictionary contains words we may not have
encountered before—inflationist, forbiddance, moosewood, pulsative—and yet
whose meanings we could very probably guess.
At the same time there are many words that we use every day and clearly know
and yet might have difficulty proving. How would you define the or what or am
or very? Imagine trying to explain to a Martian in a concise way just what is is.And then what about all those words with a variety of meanings? Take step. The
American Heritage Dictionary lists a dozen common meanings for the word,
ranging from the act of putting one foot in front of the other to the name for part
of a staircase. We all know all these meanings, yet if I gave you a pencil and a
blank sheet of paper could you list them?
Almost certainly not. The simple fact is that it is hard to remember what we
remember, so to speak. Put another way, our memory is a highly fickle thing. Dr.
Alan Baddeley, a British authority on memory, cites a study in which people
were asked to name the capital cities of several countries. Most had trouble with
the capitals of countries like Uruguay and Bulgaria, but when they were told the
initial letter of the capital city, they often suddenly remembered and their success
rate soared. In another study people were shown long lists of random words and
then asked to write down as many of them as they could remember. A few hours
later, without being shown the list again, they were asked to write down as many
of the words as they could remember then. Almost always the number of words
would be nearly identical, but the actual words recalled from one test to another
would vary by 50 percent or more. In other words, there is vastly more verbal
information locked away in our craniums than we can get out at any one time.
So the problem of trying to assess accurately just how much verbal material we
possess in total is fraught with difficulties.
For this reason educational psychologists have tended to shy away from such
studies, and such information as exists is often decades old. One of the most
famous studies was conducted in 1940. In it, two American researchers, R. H.
Seashore and L.D. Eckerson, selected a random word from each left-hand page
of a Funk & Wagnalls standard desktop dictionary and asked a sampling of
college students to define those words or use them in a sentence. By
extrapolating those results onto the number of entries in the dictionary, they
concluded that the average student had a vocabulary of about 150,000 words—
obviously very much larger than previously supposed. A similar study carried
out by K. C.