Secondly, they present a narrower set of words, sorted by frequency, in a range where they assume that you will know all of the initial ones, have a good mix of knowledge from the words in the middle, but know none of the final ones. The inventors obviously knew it would take up too much time to put all of these words to the test, so they firstly select around 40 words which stretch from the easiest to the hardest words in English. The test appears to be an elaborate concept: the inventors of the quiz chose a British dictionary with over 45,000 entries and arranged these words in order of their frequency in English speech and writing, for instance words that occur very often:Īnd later on words that appear infrequently, such as: Especially people who read a lot of fiction tend to outscore people that hardly ever read. Unsurprisingly, the website claims that reading has a considerate effect on the size of a human’s vocabulary. Over 2 million test results were taken from the self-developed quiz. Foreign test-takers scored between 2,500 and 9,000 words. The average of native test-takers of the age 8 was 10,000 words and 4-year-olds have already a considerate amount of 5,000 words. According to a recently conducted study by The Economist, most adult native speakers of the English language, who took their vocabulary test, have a range from 20,000 to 35,000 words. However, it is safe to say that The Oxford English Dictionary contains over 300,000 entries. It is impossible to provide an accurate word count for the English language.
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