Words

Volodymyr Kish

As a writer, I obviously love words. I read and write extensively, and over the course of my lifetime, I have made acquaintance with a large number of words in the three languages that I speak. I would be hard pressed to quote a specific number, but I would guess that the vocabulary stored in my memory banks would probably exceed a hundred thousand words, though there would obviously be much duplication between the different languages.

The biggest chunk of that consists of English words. English is, of course, the most widely spoken language on our globe, and is also the largest in terms of the size of its vocabulary. Although a wide range of estimates exist depending on what should be included, most experts agree that the total is somewhere in the vicinity of one half to one million words. The largest English dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), has some 301,000 main entries. If one were to count combination words and derivatives, it would raise that number to some 600,000 words.

Needless to say, there are very few people that can claim to know anywhere near that number of words. It is estimated that the average person is familiar with somewhere in the vicinity of 25,000 to 50,000 words, depending on educational level. However, normal conversational usage typically encompasses much less than that. Linguistic experts have determined that 95% of our conversations consist of the 3,000 most commonly used words. If you raise that to the 5,000 most commonly used words you would cover more than 99% of typical language usage.

Analyses have shown that a large city daily newspaper typically contains some 8,000 distinct words. Interestingly enough, that is almost the same number of distinct words as found in the King James Bible. The most famous English writer of all time, William Shakespeare, produced a combined total of 884,647 words in his lifetime collection of plays and poems, though the total number of distinct words used numbered only about 20,000. Interestingly, he is said to have invented somewhere between two and three thousand original new words. Although few will argue the literary excellence of Shakespeare’s vocabulary, there have been other authors that had a greater vocabulary range at least in terms of numbers. For instance, Edward Gibbons masterful work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire itself contains over 43,000 distinct words, more than double that of the unique words found in the combined works of Shakespeare.

Learning language begins when we are still infants, and by the time we begin formal schooling, we already have a vocabulary of several thousand words. By the time we finish high school, we have at least a passing familiarity with 25,000 to 50,000 words. If we continue on and gain a college degree, we usually add another 10,000 to 25,000 words to our available vocabulary. If we continue on even further to the Phd level, we reach a stratosphere that can exceed 100,000 words, though as I can testify from futile attempts at reading my daughter’s grad school writings, much of that defies the comprehension of the average brain.

My Ukrainian vocabulary is obviously much smaller than my English one, considering that it is based on little formal schooling and is mostly self-taught. I would hazard a guess that it consists of no more than maybe 10,000 words, or equivalent to high school entry level. Although I can read Ukrainian fairly comfortably, I make extensive use of the assortment of some dozen different Ukrainian dictionaries that I have collected during my lifetime. The largest of these contains some 50,000 words or about a third of the size of my largest English dictionary, my 2,078 page Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. It is estimated that the Ukrainian language currently contains somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 words.

Perhaps the neatest thing I have found about words and vocabulary is that as I grow older and most of my other physical and mental skills begin to wane, the one thing that keeps growing is my vocabulary. Every year, thousands of new words are added to every language, and some of them wind up in that large data base of words that I have stored in my brain. Perhaps the retrieval system may not be as fast as it once was, but I know they are all there!