Native English Speakers

Today there are 350-million native English speakers. These numbers include speakers of American, Australian, British, Canadian, Irish, New Zealand and Scots English. Noah Webster made the earliest use of the phrase American English with characteristic impatience, but ultimate accuracy: "In fifty years from this time (1806), the American English will be spoken by more people than all other dialects of the language." At the outset of the Early Modern English period (1500-1700) fewer than 5-million people in the world spoke English, as compared to 12-million speakers of French, 10-million of German, and 8 million of Spanish. By 1700 the number of English speakers had nearly doubled, while German, Italian, and Spanish barely maintained their numbers of two centuries earlier, and only French surpassed the growth rate of English among the western European nations.

Educated Speakers

At the most conservative estimate, an educated speaker of the English language knows around 100,000 words and constructions. The question that often arises is how many words a person needs to know to reasonably read representative modern American text. We could start by examining how many words William Shakespeare used in his written works. We use him because he is considered an expert on the use of the English language and there exists a rather large body of his work.

Shakespeare's Complete Works

Shakespeare's complete works consists of 884,647 words of text containing a total of 29,066 different words, including proper names. In order to understand the meaning of this we have to be certain what we mean by a word. Just what are we to count? We could decide that a word is a string of letters bounded on each side by space or punctuation. We need to decide whether inflected forms, such as those formed from the verb play (plays, playing, played) are to be words in their own right or simply members of a single class represented by the stem form play. Is this four words or one word, comprising of a set of words linguists call a lemma? If we count lemmas, Shakespeare's 29,066 different words are reduced to about 18,000.

Shakespeare's Vocabulary

Given the rules of above, counting lemmas, how does Shakespeare's vocabulary compare to that of present-day English usage? Linguists compiled a database of 1-million words selected from 500 different sources ranging from newspapers to scientific writing to general fiction. This database contains 61,805 word forms, which belong to 37,851 lemmas. This 37,851 is more than twice Shakespeare's 18,000. This could infer that either Shakespeare's vocabulary was modest or that over the last few hundred years the English language has evolved into a much richer language lexically.

Modern Vocabulary

While many words have been added to our lexical store, the main reason is almost certainly the fact that the body of Shakespeare's writings is intentionally homogeneous as opposed to the wide range of the million-word database. Shakespeare's works do not include, for example, words from scientific, medical, or mathematical texts.

One-Million Word Database

If you examine the one million word database and all words were statistically equal, then each word form would occur about 16 times and each lemma about 26 times. In actuality, the rate of repetition of individual words, and thus their frequency, is extremely uneven. The overall statistics are quite striking: the use rate of the first 100 most frequent words is so high that they account for a full 47.4 percent of all the text. Of all the running words (tokens) contained in the one million, the 100 most frequent lemmas constitute 49.6 percent of all the text. To account for 80 percent of the entire one-million-word text takes only 2,854 different word forms belonging to 2,124 distinct lemmas.

Our 3000 Word List

We have listed the 3000 most frequently used English words in alphabetically arranged groups of two hundred. Amazingly our list of lemmas derived from this million-word database consists of 2,126 filtered from a slightly different means from the million-word database.

80 percent of words Used

The fact that one needs to know fewer than 3,000 words in order to understand 80 percent of a reasonably representative modern English text does not mean that this kind of vocabulary could guarantee any of us complete cultural survival in a modern society. You need to realize that many of the most frequently occurring words in English are function words: articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verb forms such as those of "be, have," or "do." The article "the" is by far the most frequently used word in English, occurring 69,975 times in the one-million-word database. Nouns constitute 26 percent and verbs 18 percent of the database. The first 32 lemmas in the frequency ranks are function words and pronouns. The first verb "say," is at number 33 and the first noun, "man," is at number 44.

Possible Words

However knowing these first 3000 words does allow us to correctly guess additional words that do not occur in the 3000-word list. Adult English speakers know that trip is an English word. They also know that "tlip" is not an English word and they don't need a dictionary to discover that fact. But present them with the word "trin" and although they don't know the word, may need a dictionary to find out if it is a proper word or not. The form "trin" conforms to the general constraints of permissible sequences of English sounds. "Tlin" does not conform to the constraints of permissible sounds.

Prefixes

Once we have mastered the 3000 commonly used words in the English language, we have some additional tools to greatly magnify our vocabulary. Prefixes and suffixes can easily let us enlarge our store of recognizable words. The use of prefixes can add thousands of words to your vocabulary. For example, if you knew the words appoint, associate, and agree, knowing the prefix "dis" means to set or move apart, you have three new words of "disappoint, disassociate," and "disagree." If you know the words "marine" and "normal," knowing the prefix "sub," meaning under or below, you now know two new words "submarine" and "subnormal." There are 1,828 words beginning with the prefix "dis." There are 943 words beginning with the prefix "sub." There are 6,555 words beginning with the prefix "in, im" and "ir," to put in front of words like side and power to create "inside" and "impossible."

Suffixes

Suffixes also can help you know new words. Adding "ing" to many words you already know can create some 5000 new words. The use of the suffix "ion" can create 3300 new words to those you know such as "confusion, correction," and "protection." Thirteen hundred words use the suffix of "est," such as "cleanest, hardest, softest," and "nicest." Thus your vocabulary of 3000 words can take a quantum leap by the use of prefixes and suffixes. We have listed some 90 prefixes and suffixes that are used some 125,000 times in a modern American English dictionary.

Prefixes and Suffixes

Many words use both prefixes and suffixes. First starting with the word phone, we can add the prefix micro, (small) and get microphone. Adding a suffix of "ic," (like, made of), we get microphonic. "Scope," then can become "microscope," or "microscopic." "Tele" (at a distance) can give us "telephone," and "telephonic." "Tri" (three) gives us "triangle," and "tricycle." Over 5000 words use the suffix "ed" to make the past tense of a word. Over 5000 words use the suffix "ly" to make adjectives out of nouns, such as "monthly, slowly, heavenly" and "quickly." Adding the prefix "bi" (twice or two) we can make "bimonthly." "Mis" (wrong) can change "spell" to "misspell." "Un" (back, not) can make "changed" to "unchanged," "seen" to "unseen," "heard" to "unheard."

The Great Noah Webster

We owe a great deal of gratitude to Mr. Noah Webster who organized his first American dictionary in 1806. He changed British English on his own accord without the consent of anyone. He took the "our" of "colour" and changed it to "color" and other words having "our." He changed "plough" to "plow," "cheque" to "check," along with other changes. Frontier Americans added Indian words, immigrants from all over the world contributed their share. American English has made many changes over the years and continues to change. New meanings are arriving daily as new technologies are devised. My word processor still does not recognize "fax" as a word. My large dictionary of 1992 does not contain "Internet." We live in a rapidly changing world and it is up to us to accept those changes and continue to grow with them.

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