Dear tsuwm: I was unable to see more than the first page of that thread. When I clicked on
page two, I got a totally undrelated thread. And there was nothing in what I could read about
attempting to measure your own vocabulary. The figures I have seen given elsewhere vary
very much. And no clues were given as to how they had been measured. I still think a knowledgeable
statisticiancould tell us how to get a ballpark figure. I have seen figures over 20,000 for Shakespeare,
which should have been relatively easy to measure, because his words are in print, and with the
marvelous search engines available now, good evaluations whould be readily obtainable for him.
It seems very likely to me that even though there are a lot of his words I do not know, I know
so many that have been coined since, that I don't think it a shameful brag to suspect I know more
words than he did. If there are 500,000 words in a dictionary, I have only to know an average of
one in every ten wprds in the dictionary to have a vocabulary of 50,000 words. It shouldn't take
too many medium sized samples to tell if I can score that high.