Vocabulary

The vocabulary a person uses is all the words that person knows and uses. In general, a person who is five years old knows about 4,000 to 5,000 words.^[1] Adults who have gone to college may know 20,000 words.^[2]

Some of the twenty volumes of the printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary. Today, the online and CD versions are more used.

Overview

The number of words in a language is more than the words listed in one dictionary. One dictionary may have a list of 500,000 words. Another dictionary may have some other words that the other dictionary does not have. Adding up all the words in those dictionaries, there are about 750,000 words in English. There may be more words than that.^[3]

Usage

Words being used the most are short words. That is true in all languages.^[4] The 50 most common words in English have fewer than seven letters. Half of these words have fewer than four letters.^[3] The vocabulary of a language is always changing. New words are made or words change their meaning. Words about computers, like "download" are new to English. The new word "bling" came from hip hop. Words like cool have developed new meanings.^[source?]

Related pages

• Grammar
• Linguistics