Words are at the center of everything students learn in school. If students are not learning new vocabulary words, they are not learning the content. If students are not learning all of the new vocabulary words that they need to learn, they are falling behind. It’s that simple.
We all know that having an excellent vocabulary is extremely important. However, when we look at the studies, the true magnitude of the importance becomes far more apparent. For students, vocabulary is linked to reading comprehension and overall academic success. For adults, vocabulary has been linked to career success, wealth, and even intelligence.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” ― Yogi Berra
Brilliant minds have expressed Yogi Berra’s sagacity for eons (but I think he said best). And after reading this page, you will have an amazing understanding of where you are going. Furthermore, you will be able to help your students understand their vocabulary goals.
Let’s begin by examining a compact list of vocabulary facts that provides an overall foundation for what follows.
Q&A: A Summary of Vocabulary Facts
1. How many words do students know when they enter kindergarten? Answer: About 5,000 to 10,000 words.
2. How many words do students know when they graduate high school? Answer: About 50,000 words.
3. How many words do students need to learn each year? Answer: About 3,500 words each year or about 10 words every day.
4. How many different words will students come across in their textbooks in grade K-12? Answer: About 88,500 different words.
5. How many words are in the English language? Answer: About 400,000 active words, or about 500,000 lexemes. With scientific and technical words included, it’s well over 1 million lexemes.
6. How many different words did Shakespeare use in his writing? Answer: 31,534 different words.
7. How many different words did Shakespeare know? How large was his vocabulary? Answer: About 66, 534 words.
8. How large is an average adult’s vocabulary? Answer: At 20 years old, it’s about 42,000 lexemes. It grows thereafter at about 2 lexemes per day.
So, those are the facts based on a whole host of studies. Let’s now take a closer look at a few of these studies and create some context for these numbers.
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How Many Words Do Students Need to Learn?
In this section, we will move on from just numbers. We will place those numbers in context, and we will also look at some teaching-vocabulary wisdom along the way.
Cal State Northridge Reading Institute for Academic Preparation provides a nice overview of the research. In addition to this, they address the fact that students can’t learn all of the words that they need to learn through direct instruction: “The average 3rd grader knows 10,000 words. The average 8th grader knows 25,000 words. The average high school graduate knows 50,000 words. Do they learn 40,000 words in 9 years via direct instruction? No way!”
No way? The reality is that students learn most of their vocabulary incidentally through reading, writing, speaking, and listening, both in school and out of school. However, vocabulary development is one of the five key components of effective reading instruction. Furthermore, the research supports the fact that teachers must take action in many ways to help students learn all of the words they need to learn.
In Promoting Vocabulary Development: Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction (2000), the Texas Reading Initiative presents slightly lower numbers than other sources: “We know that, on average, students add 2,000-3,000 words a year to their reading vocabularies. This means that they learn from six to eight new words each day—an enormous achievement. Individual differences in vocabulary size also involve large numbers. Some fifth-grade students may know thousands more words than other students in the same classroom.”
Unfortunately, students who enter school with a small vocabulary and students who don’t acquire vocabulary words as needed face an uphill battle, as it lowers reading comprehension, and may lead to a Matthew effect, in which struggling students fall further and further behind.
The next source targets the Common Core State Standards, so it is especially relevant. As the title indicates, our goal is to make sure that our students graduate high school with a 50,000-word vocabulary. In Teaching 50,000 Words: Meeting and Exceeding the Common Core State Standards for Vocabulary (2013), Graves and Sales said, “The Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson & Weiner, 2009) lists more than 400,000 active words, and achieving students learn a substantial number of these words. Based on the work of Nagy and Herman (1987) and a number of other scholars, our best estimate is that typical students enter kindergarten with vocabularies of 5,000–10,000 words and graduate from high school with vocabularies of something like 50,000 words. This means that students are learning approximately 10 words a day.”
One basic fact about acquiring vocabulary is that it takes multiple exposures to make new words stick. We rarely learn a word the first time we encounter it. This means that in order to learn those 50,000 words, students will encounter many more words than that. In How Many Words Are There in Printed School English? (1984), William E. Nagy and Richard C. Anderson said, “Projecting from this sample to the total vocabulary of school English, our best estimate is that there are about 88,500 distinct words.” Students will need a variety of vocabulary skills and strategies to deal with so many unknown words. Clearly, using context clues when reading is essential.
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A Little Perspective: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know and Use?
To add a little perspective, I decided to find out a bit about Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) vocabulary. After all, one would imagine that Shakespeare had a great vocabulary.
In The Story of English (1986), McCrum and MacNeil say, “Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words. Estimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about half this, 15,000.”
Here is a different approach and a different set of numbers. In Estimating the Number of Unsen Species: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know? (1976), Efron and Thisted say, “Shakespeare wrote 31,534 different words, of which 14,376 appear only once, 4,343 twice, ect.” However, by using statistical inference models, they estimate that “35,000 is a reasonably conservative lower bound estimate for the amount of vocabulary Shakespeare knew but didn’t use.” This means that Shakespeare’s total vocabulary was about 66, 534 words.
Compared to our students’ targeted 50,000-word vocabulary, those numbers seem a little low to me. But on the other hand, we learn the easy and common words first. The words get more complex and less common as we continue to learn words and move through life. What did the last thousand words that Shakespeare learned look like? They were probably very uncommon and advanced words.
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A Little Perspective: How Many Words Do Most People Know?
As mentioned above, in The Story of English (1986), McCrum and MacNeil say, “Estimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about… 15,000.” That certainly doesn’t compute with all of our other estimates on vocabulary, especially our 50,000-word goal for our students.
In How Many Words Do We Know? (2016), Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, and Keuleers crunched the numbers using data from a large scale crowdsourcing experiment and came up with this: “Based on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days. The knowledge of the words can be as shallow as knowing that the word exists. In addition, people learn tens of thousands of inflected forms and proper nouns (names), which account for the substantially high numbers of ‘words known’ mentioned in other publications.”
As the above study illustrates, the internet is becoming an interesting force in measuring vocabulary. I recently took a couple of the on-line vocabulary tests to see what they were about and to add additional perspective to all of the statistics I have come across.
Keep in mind that the people taking these internet-based tests do not form a representative sample. Every person who takes a test is a person who is interested enough in vocabulary to want to take a vocabulary test. By the way, TestYourVocab.com states: “Most native English adult speakers who have taken the test fall in the range 20,000–35,000 words.”
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A Little Perspective: How Many Words Are There in the English Language?
How many words one needs to know is based on how many words there are to know. In The Story of English (1986), McCrum and MacNeil say, “Of all the world’s languages (which now number some 2700), it [English] is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighbouring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French fewer than 100,000.”
In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995; 2019), David Crystal says, “The two biggest dictionaries suggest around half a million lexemes… The true figure is undoubtedly a great deal higher… It is difficult to see how even a conservative estimate of English vocabulary could go much below a million lexemes. More radical accounts, allowing in all of science nomenclature, could easily double that figure. Only a small fraction of these totals, of course, are learned by any one of us.”
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Methods of Calculation: How Do They Count Words Known or Used?
How do they count words? There are three basic approaches: count words, count lexemes, and count lexeme families. Here is an example using these five words:
Q Q sell, sold, resell, reselling, unsellable
Count Words: 1) sell, 2) sold, 3) resell, 4) reselling, 5) unsellable
Count Lexemes: 1) sell, sold; 2) resell, reselling; 3) unsellable
Count Lexeme Families: 1) sell, sold, resell, reselling, unsellable
To understand this, you must understand the difference between inflectional morphology and derivational morphology.
Q Inflectional Morphology: Adding and removing inflectional suffixes: e.g., -ing, -s, -ed, etc.
Q Derivational Morphology: Adding and removing derivational suffixes: e.g., un-, re-, -able, -ful, etc.
Lemma and Lexeme: A lemma is basically a dictionary headword. When we count lemmas, we count just the dictionary headwords. Buy, bought, and buying have just one lemma. Boy, boys, boy’s, and boys’ also have just one lemma. The collection of extended words created from a root or base lemma through inflectional morphology is called a lexeme. Each related word in the lexeme is called a word-form.
Lexeme Family or Word Family: Lexeme families are also called word families. We include both inflectional morphology and derivational morphology for these families. Take for example, help. How many words in the dictionary contain that root? Here are a few: helpful, helper, helpless, etc. In short, every word and word-form that includes the root morpheme help is in the same lexeme family or word family.
