Darling Bill,

I have my profile set to view 99 posts at once, and I saw them all in the old thread. However, I will go ahead and copy what I consider some of the highlights here, the first one relating to what WW said.
jmh
(member)
Sun May 14 14:05:35 2000
194.176.213.156
Re: vocabulary size

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.


tsuwm
(member)
Sun May 14 13:42:26 2000
205.188.192.54
vocabulary size

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.



shanks
(newbie)
Wed May 17 03:49:47 2000
194.72.131.29
Re: vocabulary size

Stephen Pinker, in 'The Language Instinct', provides a rough method.

Use a standard dictionary a pick out a set of pages at random. List the head words from the definitions from those pages in two columns: one for words that you use confidently; the second for those who meaning you can recognise in context. Multiply up the numbers by the ratio of pages chosen to pages in the dictionary, and you have a rough and ready guide to the words you use, and the words you 'know' (even though you may never use them yourself).

I may have misstated the method slightly so I highly recommend reading the book (which is great in many other ways too).

cheer

the sunshine warrior

And a couple of links:
http://www.quinion.com/words/articles/howmany.htm
http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~s8904850/vocab.html Shoot--looks like this one's been taken down.

Speaking of links, tsuwm, your old one still comes up. :-(