The average oral vocabulary that an average 18 year old has access to and uses on a day to day basis, is about 20,000 words. They will have a much larger latent vocabulary that they understand but do not use.
The average university graduate has a working vocabulary of 50,000.
The average academic/ specialist has one of 100,000.
By the end of school the average person has read 600,000 paragraphs.
You are explicitly taught 300-400 new words a year at school, most of which you will already know.
Just a few interesting facts, courtesy of Tom Landauer, who is an American academic, and a pioneer of Latent Semantic Analysis, a technique which allows a computer to learn to read what you write, and work out if it's grammatical and sensible. Scary huh?
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1 comment:
Does that include words that you invent? (I'm thinking of some of my poetry assignment here!)
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