SLP148 Language and Computation
How many words do you know?
The estimate of how many words people knows depends on a couple of things - what you consider to be a word, and how you make the estimate. However, it is fair to say that an educated adult knows at least 50,000 words (with a word provisionally defined as a dictionary entry). Is that what you guessed?
This information is found in the textbook for the Linguistics part, "Words in the Mind", by Jean Aitchison.
Comments to: diego@ics.mq.edu.au