The language is quite difficult. The complex and long history of Great Britain has led to a very large number of words. The Oxford English Dictionary, famous in many circles, contains approximately 600,000 words and expressions. And if you add dialect and slang to this list, then the number of words will exceed 1 million. But do not be afraid of such a large number, because even native speakers do not know all English words. On average, an educated person, a native speaker, knows 12,000-18,000 words. Well, the average UK resident knows 8,000-10,000 words.
How many words do you need to know?
If a person is not a native speaker and does not permanently live in an English-speaking country, then it will be almost impossible for him to bring his stock up to the treasured 8,000-10,000 words. A good target is 4000-5000 words.There is a standard and generally accepted gradation of language. If the number of words studied is in the region of 400-500 words, then the level of proficiency is considered basic. If your active vocabulary is in the range of 800-1000 words, then you can safely communicate on various everyday topics. If such a number refers more to a passive vocabulary, then you can safely read simple texts. The range of 1500-2000 words will allow you to communicate freely all day long. If your vocabulary is 3000-4000 words, then you can easily read the English press or various thematic materials. A vocabulary base of 8,000 languages guarantees fluency in English. With so many words studied, you can freely read any literature or write texts in the language yourself. Those who have more than 8,000 words in their luggage are considered highly educated people learning English.
According to the standard vocabulary base is distributed as follows:
- beginner - 600 words;
- elementary - 1000 words;
- pre-Intermediate - 1500-2000 words;
- intermediate - 2000-3000 words;
- upper-intermediate - 3000-4000 words;
- advanced - 4000-8000 words;
- proficiency - more than 8000 words.
Thanks to this data, you can determine your level of language proficiency and set goals for yourself. But how many words have already been learned? No, you don't need to measure anything with a ruler to do this. Everything is much simpler. There is testing that can determine the number of words studied with an error rate of 10%.
To create this test, 7,000 words were taken from the dictionary. Outdated and rarely used words were removed from there. We also removed words whose meaning could be determined using ordinary logic. As a result, 2 small pages with words remained.
How to take the test?
The test must be taken with extreme honesty. On the first page there is a list of words in columns. If at least one of the possible meanings of an English word is known, then a check mark is placed next to it. The same columns with words appear on the second page. But here a selection of previously unknown words is already underway. By doing this, the program checks whether these words are really unknown. To fully complete the test, there is another page where you indicate your age, gender, how many years you have been studying English and other important questions. After specifying all the data, the completion button is pressed and the number of words in the test taker’s vocabulary appears on the screen.Assessing the number of words learned and remembered in a foreign language is primarily interesting for understanding how far a person has progressed in the “passive” perception of information: texts, speech, films, etc. I suggest you familiarize yourself with several methods that I used, found on the Internet and “homemade”. Below are a couple of tests for assessing vocabulary, a technique for finding important words that have not yet caught on in the brain, several arguments and some links.
Online tests
Of the many word count tests, I liked two. A couple of years ago I came across a fairly simple Test Your Vocabulary. As you go through three screens of words, you check off the ones you (think) you know, and then get an estimate of the total number of words you've learned. Many of my friends complained about its inadequacy - they received a quantity less than “the one about whom I know for sure that he knows worse.” But when passing, there may be a different kind of error - it seems that you know the word, but in fact you have already forgotten. They say that the hand itself reaches out to put a tick next to a word that seems vaguely familiar, so you can subconsciously overestimate your overall score.You know at least 10,500 English word families!
What do my results mean?
In general, there is no minimum vocabulary size. Language ability is related to vocabulary size, so the more words you know, the more you will be able to understand. However, if you want to set a learning goal, Paul Nation's (2006) research suggests that the following sizes might be useful:
How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening?
Skill Size estimate Notes
Reading 8,000 - 9,000
word families nation (2006)
Listening 6,000 - 7,000
word families nation (2006)
Native speaker 20,000
word families Goulden, Nation, & Read (1990)
Zechmeister, Chronis, Cull, D'Anna, & Healy (1995)
What is a word family?
There are many different forms of a word, so this test measures your knowledge of the most basic form of a word and assumes that you can recognize the other forms. For example, nation, a noun, can also be an adjective (national), a verb (nationalize), or an adverb (nationally). There are also forms which can be made with an affix such as de- or -ing which also modify the way that the word is used or adds to the basic meaning. For a test of receptive vocabulary knowledge such as this one, word families are considered to be the most accurate way of counting words.
Frequency dictionaries
After registering at www.wordfrequency.info, you can download an Excel copy of the American English Frequency Dictionary. There is also a text option.Something like this:
Rank Word Part of speech Frequency Dispersion
1 the - a 22038615 0.98
2 be - v 12545825 0.97
3 and - c 10741073 0.99
4 of - i 10343885 0.97
5 a - a 10144200 0.98
6 in - i 6996437 0.98
7 to - t 6332195 0.98
8 have - v 4303955 0.97
…
…
4996 immigrant - j 0.97
4997 kid - v 5094 0.92
4998 middle-class - j 5025 0.93
4999 apology - n 4972 0.94
5000 till - i 5079 0.92
The file contains 5000 English words, sorted by frequency of occurrence. The frequency was calculated on a huge heterogeneous array of English texts. I recently saw a friend of mine looking up words he didn't know while testing his vocabulary. After looking through the first 500, I didn't find any unknown ones. He showed the extract on his smartphone - about a dozen words from the second thousand (that is, from 1000 to 2000) and about 20 from the third. It's funny that, as you go through the list, you come across sequences of words that successfully form phrases or even short sentences. The logic is very simple - if a word is very common according to statistics, and you don’t know it, then it’s better to learn it and look at examples of use.
After reading the list of words unknown to him (already with a translation), I saw the following thing. I knew about 50-60% of these words unknown to him, but some of the meanings of the translations recorded there were unknown to me, there were several words completely unknown to me.
In general, the site is trying to be commercial, they sell lists longer than 5000, but this is no longer so interesting.
So far, this friend of mine is writing a program with a convenient interface for searching for unknown words - for learning purposes. For a global assessment, I suggested that he use not this list, but a thinned one: every seventh word from a total list of 60,000 words is given. In fact, even viewing the first couple of thousand makes you despondent; not everyone will reach 5000. Although I can’t say 100 percent, a thinned dictionary will probably show at least one word from the “family”, and the time spent will be 7 or 10 times less (depending on the frequency of thinning).
By the way, such frequency dictionaries of the Russian language contain about 160 thousand words, including abbreviations and abbreviations. There are several different similar "corpora" of English words from different organizations.
I'm interested in another question: how accurate are the tests that estimate the number of words you know? It is possible that this could be determined precisely through a check of the frequency dictionary, as well as by comparing the list of selected unknown words - their number and occurrence in different “families”.
There are general laws of remembering and forgetting. One of the main things: if a person has learned something and does not repeat it, does not use it, the information is forgotten exponentially over time. On the other hand, several repetitions lengthen and stretch the falling exponent to an acceptable level. I was very surprised when an acquaintance who worked part-time as a tutor for schoolchildren said that there is a sequence of time intervals for deep memorization: say, after 20 minutes, then after 8 hours, another day, etc., after which the information is firmly implanted in the brain . That is, the brain provides a statistically maximum level of excitation signal when encountering this information.
Ebbinghaus curve, from Wikipedia.
How I learned words at the institute.
Without taking into account the standard course, where the requirements for the first three years were quite strict, I tried to read fiction. The first big book was the old Soviet edition of Conan Doyle's The Lost World. I don’t know how much it was adapted, but there was an abundance of Victorian words and expressions in the text, and this greatly delayed progress towards the end... Of course, you could look into Lingvo from your computer, but I didn’t like to read at the computer, but to run back and forth I quickly got tired of every new word. Tablets were not common then, a pocket electronic translator was an expensive rarity, so I developed a paper system for myself. In a thick 96-sheet notebook, the spread was divided into 6 columns. Now I tried to find the notebook - it was lost. You'll have to describe it in words. Divided the alphabet into groups of letters, for example - a..d, e..f, g..j, k..n, o..q, r..t, u..w, x..z. Approximately, I estimated by eye the statistical percentage of words that begin with these letters and divided the columns in the spread into rectangles. For example, group a..d gave 2/3 of the first column, and so on. Group x..z was assigned the last remaining smallest piece in the 6th column. Then everything is simple. If you come across an unknown word, write it in the correct rectangle with its translation. Nothing inside the block is not in alphabetical order - it won't take long to find. To get a translation while lying on your bed, you need to look into a book dictionary. That is, the value of receiving a translation is quite large, more than now looking at Lingva or an online translator likeEvery even remotely serious lover of anything in the world sooner or later has a desire to measure his collection: in money, in volume, in quantity... The philatelist carefully blows the dust off the hundredth stamp in the album, Henry Ford polishes the new one to a shine tire, Rockefeller glances at the number of zeros in the amount stored in the bank, etc. How to be an English lover? Love for English can also be measured. Hours devoted to studying? Words that make up an active vocabulary!
Supplies vary
No, not firewood for the winter or sweets under the pillow, as you already understood, but English words in the vocabulary. There is nothing shameful or boastful about measuring your vocabulary: after all, there is no limit to perfection, but there are intermediate stages along the way.
Statistics, supported by practice, say that to freely express your thoughts in English you only need 2000 words. Statistics, also supported by optimism, give a figure of 1000-1500 words, but the creators of Basic English are wizards and our best friends - only 850 words. Realists and optimists, hold off on your skepticism! Basic English is divided into thematic groups of words (objects and phenomena, actions and movements, expression of qualities) - original selections of the most hit examples from each category. In fact, frequently used, mostly monosyllabic words (514 out of 850), easy to remember and pronounce, were selected.
We would like to ask everyone who relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief after the figures were announced: what do you personally mean by the concept of “expressing yourself freely”? Of course, asking for a window seat at an airport check-in counter or ordering a veal chop at a restaurant requires 2,000 words. Diving begins where, when answering a question, you do not understand the meaning of the unfamiliar words spoken or cannot talk about specific gastronomic preferences in the company of gourmets. And then we multiply 2000 by two and get 4000 words, which will certainly allow you not to lose face and keep up your conversation in English.
One more nuance: so far we have been talking about active vocabulary, i.e. layer of those words that you regularly use when speaking. What you once wrote down in a dictionary and, on occasion, perhaps (!) remember the meaning, is called passive stock - words that you seem to know, but most lie on the shelves of memory under a layer of dust. Yes, they fall into the general standings, but they don’t bring any special dividends.
Perfectionists hungry for more! Outside the language environment, learning the 8,000 words that make up the active vocabulary of an English-speaking citizen is quite difficult. It is possible, of course, but with great energy consumption, diligence and methodicality. With a luggage of 4-5 thousand words, you can safely pack your bags to Britain, the USA or Canada, where you are doomed to expand your vocabulary to the treasured 8-10 thousand units.
Gradations of vocabulary
Or how much is needed for complete happiness? You can start with the top 10 or top 100 words in the English language and be happy. A selection of the most commonly used English words around the world will set the desired vector for replenishing your vocabulary. And we again pick up a ruler and return to simple arithmetic, this time introducing you to gradations (types) of vocabulary.
400-500 words of active vocabulary - a passport to the world of English and a certificate of language proficiency at a basic level
. 800-1000 “active” words will give you the opportunity to explain yourself and talk about everyday topics, the same amount of “passives” will allow you to read simple texts
. 1500-2000 words of “assets” will reward you with the opportunity to freely communicate throughout the day or the same amount of “passives” - confident reading of more complex texts
. 3000-4000 words bring you closer to almost fluent reading of newspapers or books and magazines in your specialty
. 8000 words guarantee full communication for the average European. This is also enough for free reading and expressing thoughts in writing.
. up to 13,000 words characterize a highly educated person learning English as a foreign language.
How to determine and test English vocabulary?
Find out on the accounts? Marking familiar words in the dictionary? Let's not reinvent the wheel and borrow an answer from the creators of a test that can weigh your vocabulary in 2-3 minutes with an error of up to 10%. There will be a link to the test in a minute, but for now there will be brief instructions on how to use it and the answer to the question “how does it work.”
The developers took a dictionary of 70,000 words as a basis, discarded outdated, compound words, scientific terms and derivatives of each other, resulting in 45,000. Then they sorted them by frequency of use, sincerely admitting that the last 10,000 out of 45,000 are extremely rare, so even a respectable Briton may not feel remorse without ever using them in his life. From the English vocabulary test, words whose meaning could be obtained through logic were excluded.
The entire test consists of two pages: each contains English words in several columns without any logical sequence. If you know at least one of the possible meanings of a word, then confidently put a tick next to it. The task is the same on two pages, only on the second the program selects words from unfamiliar ones from the first page, as if wanting to make sure whether you really don’t know them. No sleight of hand, no cheating: the only condition is to be honest with yourself and not overdo the number of checkmarks.
We invite you to take the test for a couple of minutes, and then return to our article for a debriefing. We have already prepared a line :)
We measure ourselves by results
And now you are left alone with your test result. How did others cope? Statistics collected after passing this test say that among non-native speakers, the majority of respondents ended up with between 3 and 7 thousand words. There are noticeably fewer holders of 7-10 thousand words and even fewer from 11 to 30 thousand (strangely enough, even 30-thousand people paid attention to this test).
Among those for whom English is native, the situation looks different: a cosmic vocabulary of 30 thousand words for non-native speakers is the norm for 30-year-old English-speaking friends. The average result of the previous category of 3-7 thousand is typical for children 5-6 years old. Do not forget that it is precisely at this age that the world is actively being explored and the entire surrounding family with 30 thousand deposits around is actively not silent.
Let's sum it up
What should it be? vocabulary) to solve certain problems (reading English literature, communicating on everyday topics, conducting business correspondence, watching TV shows, etc.)? Many students learning English ask themselves this question.
Today we will talk specifically about English vocabulary for various levels and you will find out what opportunities each of these levels opens up for you. First, let's find out what vocabulary is. Vocabulary is the set of words that a person knows. It is divided into active (words that a person uses himself in written and spoken speech) and passive (words that a person recognizes when reading or in oral speech, but does not use them himself). It is obvious that the passive stock significantly exceeds the active one. It is worth noting that vocabulary should be understood not only as knowledge of words, but also as their correct pronunciation, writing and recognition in speech.
How many words are there in English?
It is quite difficult to answer this question. The history of Great Britain is complicated in this regard - the Iberians (the most ancient population of the British Isles), the Celts (came from modern Belgium and France), the Picts (lat. pices- colourized), the 400-year domination of the Romans, the invasion of West Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Nomes, Frisians), the raids of the Scandinavians and, finally, the Normans (Northern France, King William the Conqueror), led to the fact that words in the English language became very a lot of. The famous Oxford English Dictionary, which contains only English words and expressions, has about 600,000 English words. But according to the linguistic portal Global Language Monitor, which also includes hybrid words from dialects (Chinese English, Spanish English, computer jargon and others), there are already more than a million words in English. In practice, the vocabulary of a native speaker is an order of magnitude smaller than all the words in the language. For example, the average vocabulary of an educated English speaker is 12,000 – 18,000 words. For comparison, I will say that V. I. Dal’s “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” contains about 200,000 words, 30,000 of which are the most commonly used, and a person with a higher education knows about 10,000 Russian words. (Wikipedia).
English vocabulary for different levels
How can you use this or that English vocabulary?
- In order to be able to express yourself fluently or read at a basic level (Elementary/Pre-Intermediate), you need to have about 1000 words in stock.
- If you have about 2,500 words under your belt, you can already communicate fairly well on everyday topics and read at an intermediate level.
- With 4000-5000 words, you can communicate freely on various topics, read newspapers and specialized literature, watch and listen to television/radio programs (understanding the main meaning).
- With a vocabulary of 8,000 words or more, you can already communicate at the level of an average native speaker. This reserve is enough to feel confident among the carriers in almost any situation. You can read any English literature, watch films, have conversations on a variety of topics.
Now you understand what English vocabulary You need it to achieve your goals in your life. Having reached a certain level of English proficiency, you need to constantly maintain it. It should be remembered that if you do not actively use the language and do not practice English in everyday life, you can easily lose the skills acquired through such painstaking work. Your active English vocabulary will shift towards passive. How can we make sure this doesn’t happen? The ideal solution would be to stay in an English-speaking country. In this case, you will have constant practice and your level of language proficiency will naturally improve and increase. But what to do if this is not possible? In my article, I described in detail various approaches to learning English and effective ways to maintain motivation. To test your English vocabulary, you can use a good service called Test your vocab.
You can also check out other articles on learning vocabulary.
If you're looking at the Oxford Dictionary right now and thinking, "I'll never learn that many words!" - take your mind off sad thoughts and read this article. How many words do you really need to know? You might be pleasantly surprised!
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Word, show your passport!
English students often ask, “How many words should I learn to be able to carry on a conversation on any topic?” Good question, but before answering it, let me ask another: what do you think? A question for which there is no clear answer. Why? It is impossible to count the number of words in a language for one simple reason - it is difficult to decide what is considered a word.
It is said, for example, that for the word “set” the Oxford Dictionary gives 464 interpretations. Should a polysemantic word be considered one word or should each interpretation be considered a separate word? And what about (phrasal verbs): “set up”, “set about”, “set apart”, etc.? What about the so-called open compounds - words like “hot dog”, “ice cream”, “real estate”? Add to this the singular and plural forms, verb conjugations, different endings, prefixes and suffixes - and you will understand why it is so problematic to answer how many words there are in the English language.
In fact, the question should be posed like this: “Do you know how many words are in the largest dictionary of the English language?” If you roughly imagine the number of words in a language, it can be compared to the number of words used 90-95% of the time in everyday speech and in the news.
Talk less, work more
In 1960, the famous American children's writer Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known under the pseudonym Dr. Seuss, author of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” “The Cat in the Hat,” “The Lorax,” etc.) published the book “Green Eggs and Ham.” The book was written using only 50 words and was the result of a dispute between Seuss and his publisher, Bennett Cerf. The publisher believed that Seuss would not be able to create a finished work under such harsh conditions (Seuss had previously written “The Cat in the Hat,” which had 225 words).
If it's possible to write a book using just 50 words, does that mean we don't need a 40,000-word vocabulary to communicate with each other? Note, however, that according to Susie Dent, a lexicographer, the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is approximately 20,000 words, and the passive vocabulary is about 40,000 words.
What is the difference between active and passive vocabulary? In simple terms, active vocabulary includes words that you can remember on your own and use. As for passive vocabulary, these are those words that you recognize, the meaning of which you know, but which you are not able to use yourself.
How many words do you know, sir?
And here we come to the most interesting part. On the one hand, an adult native English speaker has an active vocabulary of about 20,000 words. On the other hand, The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists states that the first 25 words are used in 33% of everyday written texts, the first 100 words are used in 50%, and the first thousand words appear in 89% of such texts!
Thus, we can safely say that only 3000 words cover about 95% of texts on general topics (news items, blog posts, etc.). Liu Na and Nation have proven that 3000 is the approximate number of words we need to know in order to understand the rest from context when reading unsimplified texts.
Do the math yourself!
The Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 common words. 95% of texts on general topics cover a vocabulary of only 3000 words. That's 1.75% of all words!
That's right: knowing 1.75% of the English vocabulary, you can understand 95% of what you read. This is only 7.5% of the average passive vocabulary of a native speaker (40,000 words). Isn't it great?
About Pareto's law and the importance of linguistic guesswork
Mobile version for iPhone:
An alternative from the creators of Merriam-Webster's 3,000 Core Vocabulary Words:
How to Assess Your Vocabulary
So, even though a native English speaker has an active vocabulary of 20,000 words and a passive vocabulary of 40,000, learning English will be successful if you only learn 3,000 words!
95% of texts on general topics will become accessible to you, and the remaining 5% you will understand intuitively. Good luck with your studies!
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