Good Morning,
I remember finding out back in 1985 that the English Language had some 250,000 words, and some more for technical/scientific terms. What I also found out is that most people of average intelligence use a vocabulary of between 2,000 - 10,000 words. Experts, PhD's, etc. could master a vocabulary of over 20,000 words. On the flip side, some folks use less than 500 words for all of their communications. These are words that each person knows and uses on a regular basis.
These people share ideas and concepts through the use of their own arsenal of words (and that based on their knowledge of what each of those words means). For everyone to understand each other, they must know the words that being spoken or written to them. So, it can be difficult to effectively communicate when we walk around with an average of 5,000 or so words in our vocabulary, in a language which totes over a quarter of a million words.
Flashing forward some 25 years later and in an internet search for the number of words in the English Language, and it is a bit more than what it was in 1985. http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.shtml
As you can see, with technical/scientific words, there are over 1 Million words in English. This was achieved, I believe in February 2009.
We have all been forced to learn more words and concepts as our society grows and advances, but even if we were to double our vocabulary, the number of words in the language has quadrupled.
The ability to communicate relies on our ability to share words in conversation which each party fully understands. We seem to be in a losing battle for this cause as the number of words created every year seems to outpace the number of words we learn and add to our vacabulary.
If we are not careful, we could drown in our own language.
Something to think about.
Enjoy!
Sanford@berenberg.net
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