I'll try to make it - Crystal! - CLEAR
In among all the panicky and preposterous news stories online*, tis nice splendiferous to find the BBC musing on vocabulary size.
Professor David Crystal reckons most people vastly underestimate their total, and suggests gauging your own average by:
a) finding a medium-sized dictionary (i.e. one which about 100,000 entries or 1,000-1,500 pages)
b) counting how many words you know in a sample of about 20 or 30 pages
c) multiplying that figure by the number of pages
"Most people know half the words - about 50,000 - easily. A reasonably educated person about 75,000 and a really cool, smart person well, maybe all of them but that is rather unusual."
I am espeshly taken with that last sentence. Somewhere around him saying "75,000", Crystal seems to have become aware that someone bright and well worth impressing was within earshot. Or maybe just someone foxy he is trying to butter up. As mayhap could be illustrated in this picture from the Hay Festival Cartagena:
* Dear Israel. Flu cannot be kosher. Grow up. Or at least come out against Miss Piggy and the pop smash 'Pork & Beans'...
Professor David Crystal reckons most people vastly underestimate their total, and suggests gauging your own average by:
a) finding a medium-sized dictionary (i.e. one which about 100,000 entries or 1,000-1,500 pages)
b) counting how many words you know in a sample of about 20 or 30 pages
c) multiplying that figure by the number of pages
"Most people know half the words - about 50,000 - easily. A reasonably educated person about 75,000 and a really cool, smart person well, maybe all of them but that is rather unusual."
I am espeshly taken with that last sentence. Somewhere around him saying "75,000", Crystal seems to have become aware that someone bright and well worth impressing was within earshot. Or maybe just someone foxy he is trying to butter up. As mayhap could be illustrated in this picture from the Hay Festival Cartagena:
* Dear Israel. Flu cannot be kosher. Grow up. Or at least come out against Miss Piggy and the pop smash 'Pork & Beans'...