Somebody, in a casual aside on one of these threads, asked what the size of an average person's vocabulary is.

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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.

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