Jane Bouttell, Guardian, 12 August 1986
Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words. (Estimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about half this, 15,000.)
Robert McCrum, et al., The Story of English, 1986, p. 102
There seems to be no more agreement about the size of an adult’s vocabulary than there is about the total number of words in English. Estimates do indeed vary. I have heard people talk of the ‘educated’ total as being in excess of 50,000, even 100,000 words. Part of the problem, I imagine, is what is meant by ‘educated’.
How can we find out the truth of the matter? We might tape-record everything we said and heard for a month, or a year, and keep a record of everything we read and wrote. Then we could tabulate all the words, mark which ones we understood and which we failed to understand, and count up. But life is too short.
An alternative, which can be carried out in a few hours, gives a fairly good idea. You take a medium-sized dictionary – one which contains about 100,000 entries – and test your knowledge of a sample of the words it contains. A sample of about 2 per cent of the whole, taken from various sections of the alphabet, gives a reasonable result. In other words, if such a dictionary were 2,000 pages long, you would have a sample of forty pages.
It’s wise to break this sample down into a series of selections, say of five pages each, from different parts of the dictionary. It wouldn’t be sensible to take all forty pages from the letter U, for instance, as a large number of these words would begin with un-, and this would hardly be
Part of one person’s vocabulary estimates, using the headwords of the Longman Dictionary of the English Language (90,000 + headwords).
* * *
KNOWN USED
Well Vaguely No Often Occasionally Never
* * *
cablese √ √
cable stitch √ √
cable television √ √
cablevision √ √
cableway √ √
cabman √ √
cabob √ √
Caboc √ √
cabochon (noun) √ √
cabochon (adverb √ √
caboodle √ √
caboose √ √
cabotage √ √
cab-rank √ √
cabriole √ √
cabriolet √ √
cabstand √ √
cacanny (noun) √ √
cacanny (verb) √ √
cacao √ √
cacao bean √ √
cacao butter √ √
cachalot √ √
cache (noun) √ √ -
cache (verb) √ √
cachectic √ √
cache-sexe √ √
cachet √ √
cachexia √ √
cachinnate √ √
cachinnation √ √
cachou √ √
cachucha √ √
cacique √ √
typical. On the other hand, prefixes are an important aspect of English word formation (see p. 41), so we mustn’t exclude them entirely. Similarly, it would be silly to include a section containing a large number of scientific words (such as the section containing electro-), or rare words (such as those beginning with X).
One possible sample, which tries to balance various factors of this kind, takes sections of five complete pages from each of the following parts of the dictionary: C-, EX-, J-, O-, PL-, SC-, TO-, and UN-. Begin with the first full page in each case – in other words, don’t include the very first page of the C section, if the heading takes up a large part of the page; ignore the first few EX- entries, if they start towards the bottom of a page; and so on.
Draw up a table of words like the one on p. 47. On the left-hand side write in the headwords from the dictionary, as they appear. Do not include any parts of words which the dictionary might list, such as cac-or -caine, but do include words with affixes, such as cadetship alongside cadet, even if the former is listed only as -ship within the entry on cadet. In short, include all items in bold face within an entry. Include phrases or idioms (e.g. call the tune). Ignore alternative spellings (e.g. caeserian/caesarian).
The table has two columns: the first asks you to say whether you think you know the word, from having heard or seen it used; the second whether you think you actually use it yourself in your speech or writing. This is the difference between passive and active vocabulary. Within each column, there are three judgements to be made. For passive vocabulary, you ask, ‘Do I know the word well, vaguely, or not at all?’ For active vocabulary, you ask, ‘Do I use the word often, occasionally, or not at all?’ Place a tick under the appropriate heading. If you are uncertain, use the final column. You may need to look at the definition or examples given next to the word, before you can decide. Ignore the number of meanings the word has: if you know or use the word in any of its meanings, that will do. (Deciding how many meanings of a word you know or use would be another, much vaster, project!)
When you’ve finished, add up the ticks in each column, and multiply the total by fifty (if the sample was 2 per cent of the whole). The total in the first column is probably an underestimate of your vocabulary size. And if you take the first two columns together, the total will probably be an overestimate.
This procedure of course doesn’t allow for people who happen to know a large number of non-standard words that may not be in the dictionary (such as local dialect words). If you are such a person, the figures will have to be adjusted again – but that will be pure guesswork.
Here are the estimates for the first two columns, as filled in by a female office secretary in her fifties:
Words known Words used
Well 30,050 Often 16,300
Vaguely 8,250
Occasionally 15,200
38,300 31,500
The results are interesting. Note that passive vocabulary is much larger than active. This will always be the case. Note also that it’s easier to make up your mind about the words you definitely know than the words you frequently use.
Even allowing for wishful thinking, sampling bias, and other such factors, it would seem that some of the widely quoted estimates of our vocabulary size are a long way from reality. Today, educated people have a vocabulary that is much larger than Shakespeare’s.
Which dictionary?
Plotting the words you know presupposes that you have a good dictionary at home. But what counts as a good dictionary? Here are twelve criteria to bear in mind if you are buying a new one, or evaluating an old one.
Does it have the words you want to look up? Keep a note of some of the words which have puzzled you in recent weeks, and use them as a test. Don’t assume that the number of items mentioned on the cover is a guide to content. Dictionaries count their words in different ways, and a book containing 50,000 ‘words’ may actually contain less information than one containing 40,000 ‘entries’. The first might count perfect, perfectible and perfectibility as three separate items; the second might count them all under the one heading perfect (-ible, -ibility).
Is it up-to-date? Given the speed at which English vocabulary is expanding (see p.35), any dictionary which hasn’t been revised in the past five years is likely to contain omissions of importance. Keep a note of a few new words you have come across (e.g. cookie, cyberlaw), and see whether they are included.
Does it have good international coverage? Use some of the words on p. 36 to see whether American, Australian, and other varieties of English are included. Check that the dictionary tells you which area the word is used in (e.g. that nappy is British). Look at the list of abbreviations at the front of the book to see which geographical labels are given.
Can you find the word or phrase you want? Try looking up some words with alternative spellings (e.g. esophagus and oesophagus) and see whether both are included. Or idioms, such as kick the bucket. Check the preface to the dictionary to see what guidance is given.
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Are the entries clearly laid out? Look at a long entry, such as get or take, and see how easy it is to find your way about in it. Are different senses, examples, and labels clearly distinguished?
Are the definitions clear? Do you need the dictionary to look up the words used in the definition (e.g. dog as ‘carnivorous quadruped…’) ? Are related senses grouped together in a clear way? Is there any sign of ‘vicious circularity’ – defining X as Y, and Y as X? In particular, do the entries contain examples? Very often a definition is unclear without an accompanying real-life example (a citation) of how the word is used.
Does it contain lists of related words? Some dictionaries group words of similar or different meaning together, and discuss the differences between them, e.g. clever, adroit, cunning and ingenious. Does it at least give a cross-reference to words of related meaning?
Does it give guidance about usage? Check some well-known problems and see what the dictionary says about them, such as disinterested, will/shall and hopefully. Is there a large number of labels telling you about the stylistic level of the word, e.g. formal, derogatory, archaic, and technical? Is any information given about grammatical usage, apart from labelling the part of speech – noun, verb, etc. – a word belongs to?
What information does it give about pronunciation? Does it give alternative pronunciations, where these exist (as with controversy) ? Is a clear system used for showing how words are pronounced? Is the stress-pattern of the word clearly shown?
Does it contain information about where a word comes from (etymology) ? Does the dictionary give only a recent source (e.g. tomato Spanish), an original source (e.g. tomato Nahuatl), or trace the historical path the word has taken?
Does it contain encyclopedic information? Some dictionaries contain information about people, places and events. Some have pictures of objects otherwise difficult to explain (such as flags, birds, parts of a car). Some add separate sections giving special data, such as abbreviations, or tables of weights and measures.
Will it last? Will the binding allow it to be opened out flat? Is the paper of a good quality?
4
Pronunciation
How fast do you talk? One way to find out is to tape-record a piece of conversation, locate a reasonably fluent passage, and count how much is said in, say, thirty seconds or a minute. If you can’t find a passage that isn’t full of pauses and hesitation noises, then try reading aloud. Start at the top of a page, and time yourself reading aloud as naturally as you can for exactly one minute. Then count up.
‘Quick, Raymond – is it Iranian as in barn, or is it Iranian as in rain?’ Punch, 8 January 1986
But count what? What’s the best way of calculating how much is said? The obvious method would be to count the number of words in the passage, but in fact this doesn’t give a very helpful result. After all, if you’re using many long words, you’ll end up with a lower ‘score’ than if the passage consisted mainly of short words. A better technique is to count the number of syllables, or ‘beats’. Some words contain just one syllable (the, cat); some have two (po-lice, en-joy); and some have three (e-le-phant, di-vi-sive) or more (de-ve-lop-ment, in-con-se-quen-tial).
In everyday conversation, people speak at about five or six syllables a second – around 300 a minute. This is an average, of course. Some people are naturally fast, and others naturally slow, in their manner of speech. And speed varies greatly depending on the context. When reading aloud, the average is much lower – around 250 syllables per minute (spm). Reading the news on radio or television may produce even slower speeds, of around 200 spm. By contrast, in the middle of an exciting story, in intimate surroundings, a speaker can easily reach speeds of 400 spm – though not usually for more than a few seconds at a time. Foreigners may think English people speak quickly – sometimes they do!
To understand what happens in English pronunciation, we have to remember the speed at which speech normally takes place. If we don’t, we will end up with an artificial or misleading picture of what the language is like. To take just two examples. Many people think that it is essential to pronounce every sound in a word – to ‘follow the spelling’. They then get very critical of public speakers who leave sounds out, or who put extra sounds in. Or again, they think that speech is simply a matter of stringing together a series of vowels and consonants – that all we’d have to do, if we were teaching English to foreigners, would be teach them how to pronounce each sound separately, and perfect pronunciation would come as soon as the sounds were put together. Both these views, as we’ll see, are some distance from reality.
The segments of pronunciation
We are used to seeing the written language as a sequence of letters, separated by different amounts of space. This is how we were taught to write. We formed our letters one at a time, and then slowly and effortfully
The vowel system of Received Pronunciation
The transcription is the one used by A. C. Gimson in An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (London, 6th edition 2001).
/iː/ as in sea, feet, me, field /3ː/ as in bird, her, turn
/I/ as in him, village, women /ə/ as in butter, sofa, about
/e/ as in get, head, Thames /eI/ as in ape, waist, they
/æ/ as in sat, hand, plait /ai/ as in time, cry, die, high
/∧/ as in sun, son, blood, does /ɔI/ as in boy, noise, voice
/aː/ as in father, car, calm /əʊ/ as in so, road, toe, know
/ɒ/ as in dog, swan, cough /aʊ/ as in out, how, house
/ɔː/ as in cord, saw, all, more /Iə/ as in deer, here, fierce
/u/ as in put, wolf, good /ɛə/ as in care, air, bear
/ʊː/ as in soon, do, soup, shoe /ʊə/ as in poor, sure, tour
brought them together in ‘joined-up’ writing. We learned to call some of these letters ‘vowels’ (a, e, i, o, and u) and the others ‘consonants’.
Although we all learned to listen and speak long before we could read and write, it is one of life’s ironies that we don’t learn about spoken language until long after we have learned to handle written language. As a result, it is inevitable that we think of speech in the same frame of reference as we do writing. We even use the same terms, and it can come as something of a shock to realize that these terms don’t have the same meaning.
A good example of this problem is the way we have to re-think the idea that ‘there are five vowels’ when we begin to discuss speech. There are in fact as many as twenty vowel sounds in most English accents. The set of vowels used in the most prestigious accent of England, ‘Received Pronunciation’ (see p. 64), is given above. Because there aren’t enough written vowel symbols to go round, it’s necessary to develop a special system of transcription (a phonetic transcription) to identify each one. The symbols used in one such system are given alongside each vowel. (Note how many different spellings the vowels have – a problem we discuss in Chapter 5.)
The difference between spoken and written consonants is not quite so
The consonant system of Received Pronunciation
/p/ as in pie /s/ as in so
/b/ as in by /z/ as in zoo
/t/ as in tie /∫/ as in shoe
/d/ as in die /Ʒ/ as in beige
/k/ as in coo /h/ as in hi
/g/ as in go /m/ as in my
/tf/ as in chew /n/ as in no
/dƷ/ as in jaw /η/ as in sing
/f/ as in fee /I/ as in lie
/v/ as in view /r/ as in row
/Θ/ as in thin /w/ as in way
/ð/ as in the /j/ as in you
Note that consonants may also appear in ‘clusters’, such as stone, cups and try. Up to three consonants may be used together at the beginning of a spoken word in English (as in string). Up to four consonants may be used together at the end, though not always very comfortably (as in twelfths/twelfθs/and glimpsed/glimpst/).
dramatic. There are 21 consonant letters in the written alphabet, and there are 24 consonant sounds in Received Pronunc
iation (see above). Several of these sounds would be spelled with two letters in writing. It’s important to appreciate that this is only a spelling convention: the first sound in the word thin is spelled with two letters, but it is still only one sound, made by the tip of the tongue between the teeth. The question ‘How many consonants are there at the beginning of thin?’ has two answers, therefore: ‘Two, in writing’, ‘One, in speech’.
But vowels and consonants have one thing in common: they provide us with the basic building blocks, or segments, of speech, as they do of writing. By changing these segments, we alter the shape of words, and thus their meaning. Ringing the changes produces man, map, mat, met, let, lit, slit, spit, and so on. By changing one of the segments, we can change the meaning of a word. Sounds which can do this are called phonemes in linguistic studies.
This kind of approach enables us to take any sentence and analyse it into a sequence of vowel and consonant segments. Here’s an example, with the transcription showing how the sentence would be said ‘a word at a time’:
I should be surprised if John and Mary were late.
ai ∫ʊd biː s3ː praizd if dƷɒn ænd mɛərI w3ː leIt
It appears from a transcription like this that speech is made up of a sequence of single sounds, and that the words are separated by tiny pauses. Many people do think of speech in this way, as if it were ‘writing read aloud’. Once again, this is the result of being brainwashed by years of thinking of language as written language. In reality, it isn’t at all like this. There is no tiny pause between each word. And we do not make first one sound with our vocal organs, then move on to the next, then the next, and so on.
The essential thing to appreciate about pronunciation is that sounds inevitably run together. A better impression of how speech works, in fact, would be to print the transcription like this:
The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language Page 6