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?
Does that include words that you invent? (I'm thinking of some of my poetry assignment here!)
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