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Carpal Tunnel
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Somebody, in a casual aside on one of these threads, asked what the size of an average person's vocabulary is. 4327 Seriously, this is one of those vexing questions which is endlessly arguable (maybe we can do it here). As an approximation, an average high school graduate probably has a vocabulary in the 1000s, 4 years of college gets you to the 10,000s, and if you are a lexicographer (or a verbiphage) you most likely are in the 100,000s -- unabridged dictionaries contain several hundred thousand words; the OED claims more than 500,000. Why is this arguable? Do you know both of the cleaves? Do you count spelling variants (color/colour)? What about inflected forms? acronyms? etc. http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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In term of child development, I read that at eighteen months the average (understandable but not exact) vocabulary is 50 words, at aged 2 it is 200 words and aged 3 around 1,000 words and growing rapidly.
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member
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member
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Thank you, tswum. I was merely speculating on what is essentially an immeasurable concept. It also depends on the level of education, as well as economic factors (that word again!) I'm sure there is no reliable way of measurement.
<Do you know both of the cleaves?>
Interesting that the word has two meanings, that are almost opposed to each other.
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Carpal Tunnel
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>Interesting that the word has two meanings, that are almost opposed to each other. as was covered here elsewhen, they are actually two distinct words which came to have the same spelling. (I think the thread had to do with words that are their own antonym.) http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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old hand
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old hand
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You didn't mention the vocabulary size of an average scrabble-player.. In German, this is even more difficult with all the composite words which you can form. During our 9999th game of scrabble I nearly had a fight with my partner because I came up with the word "Leberkost" (liver diet) which was not in the "Duden". I think every editor of a dictionary has to put arbitrary limits here.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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The vocabulary size can be also an interesting measure of the knowledge of a foreign language ( for me, English).
But what do you mean when you say " to know a word"? It is clear to me that , very often, I know the most simple meaning of a fixed word, but I cannot understand some sentence because there are some other meanings depending on the context.
Ciao
Emanuela
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Carpal Tunnel
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>But what do you mean when you say " to know a word"? sure... multiple senses... another factor(!) of "etc." :-) http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Tsoo-wum, you...actually WROTE...
>this is one of those vexing questions which is endlessly arguable (maybe we can do it here). Great jumping
jellybeans, what are you trying to do?? Start another
beg-the-question thread??
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>Somebody, in a casual aside on one of these threads, asked what the size of an average person's
vocabulary is.
4327
tsu, I presume you mean a native English-speaker's vocab?
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Carpal Tunnel
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>I presume you mean a native English-speaker's vocab? yes; I presume you know that 4327 is a PIDOMA? http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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