maeve66 | (Reply)

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maeve66.livejournal.com

I haven't, and now I'm fascinated. I think what I've heard is that English has one of the biggest crude numbers of lexical items -- in the range of hundreds of thousands, though I could COMPLETELY be pulling that out of my ass, too, and will go look it up once I've embarrassed myself publicly here. But ALSO that you can function in English not only just with 2,000 words, but with that Orwellian simplified 1,000 word vocabulary, which they've written a (very boring, no doubt) version of the Bible in.

I just did something with my students a few days ago where we looked at the notion of your working vocabulary. Apparently, from counts of lexical items and frequency in Shakespeare, he had an extremely, extremely large working vocabulary of around 29,000 words, where the average modern person (they didn't say if it was a modern English speaking person) has a working vocabulary of around 9,000 words. I hope that I'm up in the higher range, I've got to say. We're wasting an awful lot of words in English, if 9,000 words is more common.

Here is the Wikipedia stuff on English lexical items:

The Global Language Monitor, after combining definitions in the OED2 with those unique to other dictionaries, estimates that there are approximately 990,000 words in English. The editors of Merriam Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (475,000 definitions) in their preface, estimate the number to be much higher. This is much greater than the 185,000 terms in German, and the 100,000 in French.