Did you know there are 1,010,649.7 words in the English language?
It’s a BIG number. It’s an absurd number. Who counted all of these words? Who is the arbiter of what constitutes a word? Did this same word savant approve a word that was only 70% complete?
That worries me.
Seriously, though, if there are over one million words in the English language, it begs the question, how can we ever be at a loss for words? We utterly have no excuse.
Vocabulary Lesson
With over one million words at our disposal, how many words does the average person know? That depends on how one defines average and that apparently has to do with education, and about 1,010,649.7 other factors.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but there is much debate over the expanse of an individual’s lexicon. One source states that while total vocabulary size varies greatly from person to person, people typically use about 5,000 words in their speech and about twice that many in their writing.
That seems like a reasonable estimate.
A Word Please
With 5,000 spoken words and 10,000 written words in our arsenal, you would think we would be much more successful at communicating. Alas, it’s one thing to possess a large vocabulary, it’s another to use it appropriately.
A word please, any word, can result in poor word choice. And a poor word choice can wreak havoc and lead to unintended consequences.
Precision in Communication
You know up to 10,000 words, and with today’s technology, you have over 1,000,000 more at your disposal. Please, take your time and choose your words wisely.
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