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I have wondered how the various estimates of people's vocabulary size were arrived at.
Naturally I wonder what a reasonable figure would be for my vocabulary, and wish I
knew how to determine it.
Perhaps it would be a fun idea for our members to kick around, and express ways
of making a plausible evaluation of our vocabulary sizes.
It is obviously impossible to make a list of the words we know. I am sure that some
statistical approach ought be possible, but am so ignorant of statistics I know I am
incapable of designing a valid appoach. Perhaps if I make some suggestiongs it might
interest other members to comment and make alternative recommendations.
My idea is to take a dictionary that states the number of word it contains.
If I then take an equal sample of words from each letter, and note the number words
in the total really unknown to me, and compare its ratio to the total number of words
in the dictionary, I should get a crude estimate of my total vocabulary.
Obviously my sample would have to be limited by the amount of time and energy
I was willing to devote to the task. But if I took a short series of such estimates,
and averaged them, I should get closer to a reliable figure.
Let's hear some arguments about a workable method.
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I read somewhere a long time ago--at least 25 years ago--that, if you multiplied your working vocabulary (spoken and written) by 3, you'd get the total for your reading vocabulary.
Now who's gonna go through all your writing and listen to you long enough to do those calculations?
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This site points out the difficulties in determining vocabulary size by comparing it to the difficulty in determining the number of words in the English language.
Looks to be a prodigeous if not impossible task.
http://www.bartleby.com/68/99/6399.html
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Dear tsuwm: Please take your two year old YART and insert it up Your Ano-Rectal Terminus.
I know it would be difficult to do accurately and easily. But a series of samplings out to give
some approxiamation. The big drawback is the proability of it being unacceptably laborious
to get a meaningful result. I still think a knowledgeable statistician would devise a method
that might not be either wildly inaccurate or unduly onerous.
Please let us further discussion.
I used to laugh at the remark that there were liars, goddam liars, and statisticians, and
that statistics was the art of lying with numbers. I now recognize that statistics have come
a long ways since then, and wish I were not too senile to learn enough statistics to make an
attempt to do so.
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dear bill, upyours® too; I seem to recall that there was at least one estimation method, gleaned from Steven Pinker, in that thread which would not be invalidated by dint of being two years old. SWAK.
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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.
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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.ah, the old long thread problem rears its head again--let's see if I can find the specific post… ::time out:: here it is: http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=1181p.s. - the thread doesn't seem to be that long, Bill. what do you have your maximum page size set to?
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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.htmhttp://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. :-(
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>Speaking of links, tsuwm, your old one still comes up.
yeah, the bad news is that I can't get AoL (ha!) to take the old site down; the good news is that it has a link to the new site.
aside: I talked to an actual person at AoL (HA!) last week about this and after working around the ESL thang with him, I thought we had an understanding--he said he wrote up a ticket, gave me a number and all, but nothing has happened in the intervening 10 days. I think that site is permanently in limbo.
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