Sandara Park: How many English words do you actually know?


	December 14, 2024

Original photo by loops7/ iStock

The average native English speaker only knows about 6% of English words.

The English language is vast — so vast, in fact, that the average native speaker only knows about 6% of all English words, which equates to roughly 35,000 of the 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. That percentage may seem small, but the fact that most of us get by just fine on a daily basis suggests the other 94% of words are fairly obscure or redundant. English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language due to its history of freely incorporating words from other languages, particularly French (the origin of at least 30% of English words). Most adults learn an average of one new word per day until middle age, when vocabulary growth tends to slow or even stop — all the more reason to keep the mind sharp with crossword puzzles and word games.

Different studies have shown slightly different stats, of course. While one estimates the average English-speaking adult's vocabulary somewhere between 20,000 and 35,000 words, another estimates it closer to 42,000. The latter study featured 70 real words alongside 30 made-up words and asked subjects to identify which was which; however, they weren't required to define the words. This could account for the higher estimate of known words, as participants may have recognized some words without actually knowing their meanings.

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		Numbers Don't Lie

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The longest word in English has 45 letters.

You've probably never spoken the longest English word out loud, which is good for two reasons. The first is that pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis clocks in at 45 letters and is exceedingly difficult to pronounce. The second is that it's defined as "a lung disease caused by inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust," which is to say that if you ever have occasion to speak it, it may not be a happy one. To get even more technical, Merriam-Webster notes that the longest "string of letters used to describe something," which isn't a word but rather the chemical name of a protein, contains a staggering 189,819 letters and takes 50 pages to write in its entirety. (So you'll excuse us not including it here.) It also takes more than three hours to pronounce, a feat that at least one person has actually accomplished.

Today's edition of Interesting Facts was written by Michael Nordine and edited by Brooke Robinson.