On July 23 2011 08:21 munchmunch wrote:
That's way lower than the actual number. The average person with a high school education knows about 10,000 words, I would guess. Googling around the web, the estimate for a college educated person is 20-25k. Actually, it seems hard to find good references for this, but one good article I did find is http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm, which suggests the actual number of words for a college student could be as high as 60k.
That's way lower than the actual number. The average person with a high school education knows about 10,000 words, I would guess. Googling around the web, the estimate for a college educated person is 20-25k. Actually, it seems hard to find good references for this, but one good article I did find is http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm, which suggests the actual number of words for a college student could be as high as 60k.
I'm not sure how accurate this website is, but http://testyourvocab.com/ is pretty interesting. (Sorry for the tangent. Apparently the average for people taking this test is 29,000 words; of course since it's self-reported people are bound to give themselves the benefit of the doubt...)