How many English words does a college graduate know?

Summary: Armed with a new list of words and using the power of social media, a new study has found that by the age of 20, a native English-speaking American knows 42,000 dictionary words. How many words do we know? It turns out that even language experts and researchers have a tough time estimating this.

How many English words does an educated person know?

The average high-school educated English speaker knows about 45,000 words (as high as 60,000 when including proper names and foreign words).

Is the average vocabulary shrinking?

The average vocabulary of an American is in decline But by 2016, that difference had dropped to 2.9 correct answers. The authors suggest several reasons to explain this drop. A 2016 study estimated that the average vocabulary of an American is about 42,000 words at the age of 20.

How many English words does a college student know?

By providing a clear rationale for the word source which was sampled, and by using clearly defined operational criteria for what constitutes a word as well as for the procedures used in the estimation task, we found that the average number of different words known by a college student is 16,785.

How many words does a 60 year old know?

60-year-old Notice that the average number of words known by a 22-year-old (17,200), as estimated by Goulden et al. (1990), lies in-between our estimated number of lemmas known (42,000) and our estimated number of base words known (11,100), in line with the observation that Goulden et al.

How many words does an American know?

An average 20-year-old American knows 42,000 words, depending on how you count them | Science | AAAS.

Do Americans have poor vocabulary?

Americans have trouble with words… Only 78.3\% of American adults reached a Level 2 (out of 5) in literacy, less than all other OECD members save Spain and Italy (p. 69).

How many words does the average American grade school student speak?

A speaker at a recent school board meeting claimed the vocabulary of the average American grade school student was 25,000 words in 1945 and about 10,000 today. This is pretty disturbing if true. What do you think?

How many words are in an unabridged dictionary?

In general, unabridged dictionaries generally include over 300,000 entries, depending on how the dictionary counts an “entry”—and we’re back to the same thorny question about the different versions of run and all its inflections, or “change in the shape of a word, generally by affixation.”

How many words do you have in your Vocab?

For that number, let’s look at a recent study by the people at testyourvocab.com who say that most adult native-speakers of English have a vocabulary of 20,000-35,000 words. Obviously, these are not the same words and everyone’s vocabulary will include different words according to their career, education and interested.

How many words are there in the Oxford English Dictionary?

A more useful number from the Oxford English Dictionary would be the 171,476 words that are in current use. That means there are examples of each of these words being used recently.