The answer depends on who you ask. A quick search for how many words are known by the average native English speaker can give you results that vary widely. Some word counts count every form of a word.
By some counts, these would all count as individual words, all with slightly different meanings related to person, number and tense. Other counts only look at headwords or word families, the forms by which most words are listed in the dictionary and the root word from which all other forms are derived. The grammatical understanding you acquire over time allows you to make the word plural, past tense, future tense or a direct object.
Where do we draw the line between one cluster of meanings and the next? This is the distinction between active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary is vocabulary that you can quickly remember and actively use when writing, speaking and thinking.
Generally speaking, new words will first be gradually absorbed into your passive vocabulary as you encounter them several times and start to get a feel for their use. Native speakers and second language speakers alike generally have a passive vocabulary several times greater than their active vocabulary. In general, we can describe levels of fluency in a foreign language with these rough word counts:. A good starting point in any language is a list of high frequency vocabulary , or a handy base vocabulary list for any language.
All in all, we tested , individuals who returned , sessions. The number of sessions is higher than the number of participants because quite a few participants took the vocabulary test more than once each session had a different sample of words and non-words.
In order not to give undue weight to individuals some participants took the test more than times , we limited the analyses to the first three sessions if participants completed multiple sessions. Figure 3 shows the percentage of lemmas known to native speakers of American English as a function of age and education level see Keuleers et al.
As can be seen, the knowledge of words increases with age and education. Indeed, a test in which persons are asked to spot a word among non-words is thought to be a good estimate of premorbid intelligence in elderly people and patients with dementia Baddeley et al. Percentage of lemmas known as a function of age and educational level. The solid black line shows the median percentage known as a function of age.
It shows a steady increase up to the age of 70 for the people who took part in the study. The gray zone indicates the range of percentages between percentile 5 and percentile The impact of education level is shown in the lines representing the medians of the various groups. The median score of year-olds is The difference between education levels is also substantial and likely illustrates the impact of reading and studying on vocabulary knowledge.
Indeed most of the difference between the education levels seems to originate during the years of study. Figure 4 shows the same information for the base words the word families. A year-old knows The lower percentage of base word knowledge is to be expected, because well-known lemmas tend to come from large word families.
The former add much more weight to the tally of lemmas known vs. As a result, quite a lot of lemmas can be known based on the mastery of a limited number of prolific base words. Percentage of base words word families known as a function of age and educational level. The findings so far are summarized in Table 4 and translated into reasonable estimates of words known.
They show that the estimates depend on a the definition of word known, b the age of person, and c the amount of language input sought by the person. For the number of alphabetical types encountered, the low end is defined as a person who only gets input from social interactions; the high end is a person who constantly reads at a pace of words per minute.
For the number of lemmas and base words known the low end is defined as percentile 5 of the sample we tested, the median as percentile 50, and the high end as percentile TABLE 4. Estimates of the words known by year-olds and year-olds at the low end and the high end. Notice that the average number of words known by a year-old 17, , as estimated by Goulden et al.
Multiplying the number of lemmas by 1. As Nation argued, it is easier to understand how a year-old could have learned 11, base words which amounts to 1. The estimates of Table 4 are for receptive vocabulary understand a word when it is presented to you. Productive word knowledge being able to use the word yourself is more limited and estimated to be less than half receptive knowledge. It is unavoidable that the estimates from Table 4 are approximations, dependent on the choices made.
All we can do, is be transparent about the ways in which we derived the figures and to make our lists publicly available, so that other researchers can adapt them if they feel a need to do so. A first limitation is the list of 61, lemmas we used. Although we are reasonably sure the list contains the vast majority of words people are likely to know, there are ample opportunities to increase the list.
As indicated above, the Collins scrabble list could be used to more than double the number of entries. We are fairly confident, however, that such an increase will not change much in the words known by the participants see also Goulden et al. The words we are most likely to have missed are regionally used common words and recently introduced words.
On the other hand, a recent study by Segbers and Schroeder in German illustrates the importance of the word list started from. These authors worked with a list of , lemmas and on the basis of a procedure similar to Goulden et al.
A comparison of both lists by a German—English researcher would be informative to see why the estimates are larger in German than in English. German has more single-word compounds than English which partly explains the higher number of lemmas known in German than in English , but this should not affect the number of monomorphemic lemmas known.
A second limitation is that our list does not include meaningful multiword expressions. Such sequences are particularly important when the meaning of the expression is not clear from the individual words.
A third limitation is that our definition of words does not take into account the fact that some words have multiple senses and sometimes even meanings. Even worse, our assessment says nearly nothing about how well the participants know the various words.
They were only asked to select the words they knew. Estimates of vocabulary size are smaller if more demanding tests are used, as can be seen in Table 3 [e. Indeed, understanding the meaning of words is not a binary, all-or-nothing phenomenon but a continuum involving multiple aspects Christ, As such, our estimates should be considered as upper estimates of word knowledge, going for width rather than depth.
The estimates also deal with receptive word knowledge understanding words other people use. As indicated above, productive knowledge is thought to be roughly half of receptive word knowledge. Finally, our list excludes names and acronyms. An interesting question is how many names people are likely to know. In principle, these could run in hundreds of thousands certainly for older people reading a lot, as shown in Table 4. On the basis of our experiences, however, we believe that the number is more likely to be in the tens of thousands or even thousands depending on the person.
For instance, when we probed a large segment of the Dutch-speaking population about their knowledge of fiction authors with a test similar to the vocabulary test described above, we saw that few people know more than author names out of a total of 15, collected from a local library. Thus far, the number includes some 11, names. It would be interesting to examine how many of these are effectively known by various people. The smaller estimates agree with the observation of Roberts et al.
Based on an analysis of the literature and a largescale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average year-old student the typical participant in psychology experiments knows 42, lemmas and 4, multiword expressions, derived from 11, word families. This knowledge can be as shallow as knowing that the word exists. Because people learn new words throughout their lives, the numbers are higher for year-olds. The numbers also depend on whether or not the person reads and watches media with verbal content.
All authors listed, have made substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Anderson, R. The Vocabulary Conundrum. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois. Google Scholar. Baayen, R. Word Frequency Distributions. Berlin: Springer Science and Business Media. Baddeley, A.
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Hayes, D. Speaking and writing: distinct patterns of word choice. Heaps, H. Information Retrieval: Computational and Theoretical Aspects. Herdan, G. Use is an accepted word in Word with Friends having 4 points. Use is a 3 letter short Word starting with U and ending with E. Below are Total 4 words made out of this word. Anagrams of use 1. Occasion or need to employ; necessity; as- to have no further use for a book.
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