Diller in 1978, cited by Aitchison in Words in the Mind, put the vocabulary level
even higher—at about 250,000 words. On the other hand, Jespersen cites the
case of a certain Professor E. S.Holden who early in the century laboriously tested himself on every single word in Webster's Dictionary and arrived at a total of just 33,456 known words. It is
clearly unlikely that a university professor's vocabulary would be four to six
times smaller than that of the average student. So such studies would seem to tell
us more about the difficulties of framing tests than about the size of our
vocabularies.
What is certain is that the number of words we use is very much smaller than the
number of words we know. In 1923 a lexicographer named G. H. McKnight did
a comprehensive study of how words are used and found that just forty-three
words account for fully half of all the words in common use, and that just nine
account for fully one quarter of all the words in almost any sample of written
English. Those nine are: and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, and you.
By virtue of their brevity, dictionary definitions often fail to convey the nuances
of English. Rank and rancid mean roughly the same thing, but, as Aitchison
notes, we would never talk about eating rank butter or wearing rancid socks. A
dictionary will tell you that tall and high mean much the same thing, but it won't
explain to you that while you can apply either term to a building you can apply
only tall to a person. On the strength of dictionary definitions alone a foreign
visitor to your home could be excused for telling you that you have an abnormal
child, that your wife's cooking is exceedingly odorous, and that your speech at a
recent sales conference was laughable, and intend nothing but the warm-est
praise.
The fact is that the real meanings are often far more complex than the simple
dictionary definitions would lead us to suppose. In 1985, the department of
English at the University of Birmingham in England ran a computer analysis of
words as they are actually used in English and came up with some surprising
results. The primary dictionary meaning of words was often far adrift from the
sense in which they were actually used. Keep, for instance, is usually defined as
to retain, but in fact the word is much more often employed in the sense of
continuing, as in "keep cool" and "keep smiling." See is only rarely required in
the sense of utilizing one's eyes, but much more often used to express the idea of
knowing, as in "I see what you mean." Give, even more interestingly, is most
often used, to quote the researchers, as "mere verbal padding," as in "give it a
look" or "give a report." [London Sunday Times, March 31, 1985]In short, dictionaries may be said to contain a certain number of definitions, but
the true number of meanings contained in those definitions will always be much
higher. As the lexicographer J. Ayto put it: "The world's largest data bank of
examples in context is dwarfed by the collection we all carry around
subconsciously in our heads. "
English is changing all the time and at an increasingly dizzy pace. At the turn of
the century words were being added at the rate of about i,000 a year. Now,
according to a report in The New York Times [April 3, 1989], the increase is
closer to 15,000 to 20,000 a year. In 1987, when Random House produced the
second edition of its masterly twelve-pound unabridged dictionary, it included
over 50,000 words that had not existed twenty-one years earlier and 75,000 new
definitions of old words. Of its 315,000 entries, 210,000 had to be revised. That
is a phenomenal amount of change in just two decades. The new entries included
preppy, quark, flextime, chairperson, sun blocker, and the names of 800 foods
that had not existed or been generally heard of in 1966—tofu, piña colada,
chapati, sushi, and even crepes.
Unabridged dictionaries have about them a stern, immutable air, as if here the
language has been captured once and for all, and yet from the day of publication
they are inescapably out of date.
Samuel Johnson recognized this when he wrote: "No dictionary of a living
tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words
are budding, and some are fading away."
That, however, has never stopped anyone from trying, not least Johnson himself.
The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact
when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling
them. From the seventeenth century when Cardinal Richelieu founded the
Academie Francaise, dictionary making has been earnest work indeed. In the
English-speaking world, the early dictionaries were almost always the work of
one man rather than a ponderous committee of academics, as was the pattern on
the Continent. In a kind of instinctive recognition of the mongrel, independent,
idiosyncratic genius of the English tongue, these dictionaries were often
entrusted to people bearing those very characteristics themselves. Nowhere was
this more gloriously true than in the person of the greatest lexicographer of the mall, Samuel Johnson.
Johnson, who lived from 170g to 178 4, was an odd candidate for genius. Blind
in one eye, corpulent, incompletely educated, by all accounts coarse in manner,
he was an obscure scribbler from an impoverished provincial background when
he was given a contract by the London publisher Robert Dodsley to compile a
dictionary of English.
Johnson's was by no means the first dictionary in English. From Cawdrey's
Table Alphabeticall in 1604 to his opus a century and a half later there were at
least a dozen popular dictionaries, though many of these were either highly
specialized or slight (Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall contained just 3,000 words
and ran to barely a hundred pages). Many also had little claim to scholarship.
Cawdrey's, for all the credit it gets as the first dictionary, was a fairly sloppy
enterprise. It gave the definition of aberration twice and failed to alphabetize
correctly on other words.
The first dictionary to aim for anything like comprehensiveness was the
Universal Etymological Dictionary by Nathaniel Bailey, published in 1721,
which anticipated Johnson's classic volume by thirty-four years and actually
defined more words. So why is it that Johnson's dictionary is the one we
remember? That's harder to answer than you might think.