Second edition

§ 14. Number of Vocabulary
Items in Actual Use
and Number of Vocabulary
Units in Modern English

Taking into account the growth of the vocabulary in the last forty years an estimate of 30,000 words in the actual working vocabulary of educated persons today may be considered reasonable though it comprises a number of non-assimilated, archaic and occasional words. It should be pointed out, however, that a considerable number of words are scarcely ever used and the meaning of quite a number of them is unknown to an average educated English layman, e.g. abalone, abattoir, abele and the like.⁴ It follows that there is a considerable difference between the number of lexical items in Modern English vocabulary and the number of lexical items in actual use. Bу the phrase “in actual use” we do not imply words and phrases used by any single individual but
¹ See, e. g., The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1957.
² See ‘Various Aspects ...’, § 6, p. 180.
³ Clarence L. Barnhart. Methods and Standards for Collecting Citations for English Descriptive Dictionaries, 1975.
⁴ See The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 1957,
197
the vocabulary actually used and understood by the bulk of English-speaking people as a whole at a given historical period. It also follows that not all vocabulary items are of equal practical importance. In this connection it should be recalled that there is a considerable difference between the vocabulary units a person uses and those he understands. According to the data available, the “passive” vocabulary of a “normally educated person” comprises about 30,000 words. At best about 20,000 are actually used in speech. Of these not all the words are equally important.
The relative “value” of lexical items is dependent on how frequently this or that particular unit occurs in speech and on the range of application of these units. 4,000 — 5,000 of most frequently occurring words are presumed to be amply sufficient for the daily needs of an average member of the given speech community. It is obvious that these 4,000 — 5,000 comprise ordinary words which are as a rule polysemantic and characterised by neutral stylistic reference.¹ Specialised vocabulary units (special words and terminology) are naturally excluded.
It should not be inferred from the above that frequency alone is an adequate criterion to establish the most useful list of words. There are, especially in science, words that appear very rarely even in a large corpus, but are central to the “concepts of a whole science.
As is well known terminology in various fields of scientific inquiry comprises many peculiar vocabulary units the bulk of which is made up of Latin or Greek morphemes. Terms possess a number of common features in all European languages. Terms are as a rule used by comparatively small groups of professionals and certainly not by the language community as a whole. Most of them are to a certain extent “international”, i.e. understandable to specialists irrespective of their nationality. Compare for example Russ. зуб — зубы, English tooth — teeth and the corresponding phonetic terms Russ. дентальный, Eng. dental. Compare also Eng. radio — Russ. радио, Eng. electronics — Russ. электроника, etc. Special words and terms make up the bulk of neologisms and the question naturally arises whether terms belong to common English vocabulary items. Nevertheless they are of great importance for those who are working in this or that branch of science or technology.