English

Noun

vocabularies

1. Plural of vocabulary

The vocabulary of a person is defined either as the set of all words that are understood by that person or the set of all words likely to be used by that person when constructing new sentences.

Tests of vocabulary are integral components of intellectual assessment within psychology. Level of vocabulary has been consistently found to predict overall level of intellectual functioning as well as educational achievement.

English Vocabulary

It is widely circulated that the English language has the largest vocabulary of any language, but this claim is difficult to formulate precisely, and essentially impossible to prove.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists a total of 171,476 words with an additional 47,156 obsolete and 9,500 derivative words as subentries, giving almost a quarter of a million words in the English language, even when technical terms, place names and multiple word senses are excluded. Clearly, therefore, any individual's vocabulary must necessarily consist of only a small subset of the total possible vocabulary of the language. One estimate, by David Crystal, is that the average college graduate has an active vocabulary of 60,000 words and an additional passive vocabulary of 75,000 words.

The Vocabularies of Other Languages

• The three major Japanese dictionaries each contain between 220,000 and 240,000 individual lexical entries (words).
• The mainland Chinese Hanyu Dacidian dictionary and the Taiwanese Zhongwen Dacidian each list about 370,000 words for the Mandarin Chinese language.

Other uses

The word "vocabulary" is also used figuratively in the arts or crafts for qualities or techniques distinctive to a particular style, especially in the context of architectural style.

See also

• Glossary
• Grammar
• Idiom
• Jargon
• Lexicon
• Part of speech
• Register (linguistics)
• Slang
• Technical terminology
• Term
• Terminology

References