Vocabulary is the total number of words in a language. It is also the collection of words a person knows and uses in speaking or writing. However, language experts disagree about how to determine what a word is. Some experts believe that a word is whatever is surrounded by spaces in writing. Yet in modern English, both car seat and carseat are words for the same object. Whether we count them as two words or one makes a difference in measuring the size of the vocabulary.
The vocabulary of a language is always changing and growing. As life becomes more complex, people devise or borrow new words to describe human activity. People also change the meanings of existing words to fit new circumstances, especially as technology changes. Words can become obsolete, and they fall out of use. No one knows the exact number of English words today, but there are probably about 1 million.
A person has two kinds of vocabularies. The active or use vocabulary is made up of words used in speaking or writing. The passive or recognition vocabulary consists of words a person understands when listening or reading. Many people have a recognition vocabulary several times larger than their use vocabulary. This means that they understand words they hear or read but do not habitually use in speaking or writing. For Americans, the average use vocabulary is 10,000 words, but the average recognition vocabulary is 30,000 to 40,000 words.
A person continually builds a vocabulary. Studies have shown that a child entering school may know from 8,000 to 15,000 words. But by the completion of college, he or she may have a vocabulary of 50,000 words or more.
The range of a person’s vocabulary is a clue to the person’s culture and education. Control over words is often the same as control over the ideas the words represent. The dictionary is an important tool for increasing your vocabulary. If you encounter a word you do not know, look it up and find out what it means and how it is used.
