Thursday, February 11, 2010

English Vocabulary - English Language


One of the additional common questions that reach your destination for the Q&A section asks how various words there are in the English language. Approximately as common are requests for the standard size of a person’s vocabulary. These sound like trouble-free questions; I have to tell you that they’re certainly easy to ask. But they’re about impossible to answer acceptably, because it all depends what you indicate by word and by vocabulary (or even English).
That this is not a unimportant question can be proved by looking at half a dozen recent dictionaries. You won’t find two that have the same opinion on what to list.
Approximately each word in the language has this fuzzy partial shadow of inflected forms, part senses and compounds, some to a much greater extent than climb. To take a famous case, the entry for set in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to 60,000 words. The noun alone has 47 part senses listed. Are all these separate words?
And in a wider sense, what do you comprise in your record of words? Do you calculate all the regional variations of English? Or slang? Dialect? family unit or private language?
Correct names and the names of spaces? And what concerning abbreviations? The largest dictionary of them has additional 400,000 entries — do you calculate them all as words? And what regarding informal and formal names for livelihood things? The forest louse is identified in Britain by many general names — tiggy-hog, cheeselog, pill bug, chiggy pig, and rolypoly in the middle of others. Are these all to be counted as split words? And, to take a more consultant example, is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the formal name for bread yeast, to be counted as a word (or possibly two)? If you say okay, you’ve got to insert another pair of million such names to the English-language word calculation. And what regarding medical terms, such as syncytiotrophoblastic or holoprosencephaly, that few of us still encounter?

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