GRE
GRE
GRE Verbal Practice
GRE Word list
Best Books for GRE
Colleges: GRE not required
GRE Math Test -1
TOEFL
TOEFL
Free TOEFL Tests
Sample TOEFL Test - 1
Best Books for TOEFL
Test Prep
IELTS
ACT
SAT
MCAT
LSAT
GMAT
TOEIC
Duolingo
Advanced Placement
More Tests
Best Colleges & Programs
Top Colleges and Degree Courses
Top Engineering Schools
Top MBA Programs
Top Psychology Programs
Top Economics Schools
Top Nursing Programs
Biology and Life Sciences
Fine Arts
Law
Healthcare
Top Majors
Certificate Programs
High Paying Certificate courses!
ABCTE Certification
ARRT Certification
CPA - Certified Public Accountant
Lifeguard Certifications
Life Coach Certification
Personal Trainer Certifications
PHR Certification
CDA Certification
Study Abroad
Destinations
Study in US
Study in Canada
Study in UK
Study in Australia
Study in New Zealand
Study in Germany
Study in France
Study in Italy
Study in Netherlands
Study in Ireland
Study in Singapore
More countries...
Student Visa
Student Visa: USA
F-1 visa rejected, any options?
Student visa: Canada
Student visa: UK
Student visa: Australia
Student visa: Germany
Student visa: Netherlands
Student Visa: New Zealand
Student visa: France
Student visa: Singapore
Work Visa
Work visa for USA - H1B
Work visa for UK
Work visa for Canada
Work visa for Australia
Work visa for Germany
Work visa for Ireland
Work visa for Singapore
Work visa for Hong Kong
Admissions
Cost of getting a degree
Fall vs Spring
College Application Deadlines
Letter of Intent
Sample Statement of Purpose MS - CS
Sample Statement of Purpose MS - Psychology
What is GPA?
MBA Application Process
US - Credits, Thesis, Semestes?
How to Transfer Credits
Affordable Recommended programs
Prepare for Gradschool Interview
Colleges accepting low GRE scores
Graduate vs Undergraduate
How to Finance your education
Home
/
Tests & Exam
/
IELTS
IELTS Practice Test (Reading) - 4
How Many Words
Michael Quinlon, 1996
One of the more common questions that arrive for the Q&A section asks how many words there are in the English language. Almost as common are requests for the average size of a person's vocabulary. These sound like easy questions; I have to tell you that they're indeed easy to ask. But they're almost impossible to answer satisfactorily, because it all depends what you mean by word and by vocabulary (or even English). What we mean by word sounds obvious, but it's not. Take a verb like climb. The rules of English allow you to generate the forms climbs, climbed, climbable, and climbing, the nouns climb and climber (and their plurals climbs and climbers), compounds such as climb-down and climbing frame, and phrasal verbs like climb on, climb over, and climb down. Now, here's the question you've got to answer: are all these distinct words, or do you lump them all together under climb?
That this is not a trivial question can be proved by looking at half a dozen current dictionaries. You won't find two that agree on what to list. Almost every word in the language has this fuzzy penumbra of inflected forms, separate senses and compounds, some to a much greater extent than climb. To take a famous case, the entry for set in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to 60,000 words. The noun alone has 47 separate senses listed. Are all these distinct words?
And in a wider sense, what do you include in your list of words? Do you count all the regional variations of English? Or slang? Dialect? Family or private language? Proper names and the names of places? And what about abbreviations? The biggest dictionary of them has more than 400,000 entries - do you count them all as words? And what about informal and formal names for living things? The wood louse is known in Britain by many local names - tiggy-hog, cheeselog, pill bug, chiggy pig, and rolypoly among others. Are these all to be counted as separate words? And, to take a more specialist example, is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the formal name for bread yeast, to be counted as a word (or perhaps two)? If you say yes, you've got to add another couple of million such names to the English-language word count. And what about medical terms, such as syncytiotrophoblastic or holoprosencephaly, that few of us ever encounter?
The other difficult term is vocabulary. What counts as a word that somebody knows? Is it one that a person uses regularly and accurately? Or perhaps one that will be correctly recognised - say in written text - but not used? Or perhaps one that will be understood in context but which the person may not easily be able to define? This distinction between what linguists call active and passive vocabularies is hard to measure, and it skews estimates.
The problem doesn't stop there. English speakers not only know words, they know word-forming elements, such as the ending - phobia for some irrational fear. A journalist rushing to meet a deadline might take a word he knows, like Serb, and tack on the ending to make Serbophobia. He's just added a word to the language (probably only temporarily), but can he really be said to have that word in his vocabulary? If nobody ever uses it again, can we legitimately count it? By reversing the coining process, a reader of the newspaper can easily work out the word's origin and meaning. Has the reader also added a word to his vocabulary?
Can you now see why estimates of the total number of words in the English language and in a person's vocabulary are so difficult to make, and why they vary so much one from another? David Crystal, in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, suggests that there must be at least a million words in the language. Tom McArthur, in the Oxford Companion to the English Language, comes up with a similar figure. David Crystal further says that if you allow all scientific terms the total could easily reach two million (this doesn't count the formal names for organisms I spoke about earlier, just technical vocabulary).
Assessing the size of the vocabulary of an individual is at least as problematical. Take Shakespeare: you'd think it would be easy to assess his vocabulary. We have the plays and sonnets and we just have to count the words in them (according to the American Heritage Dictionary, there are 884,647 of them, made up of 29,066 distinct forms, including proper names). But estimates of Shakespeare's vocabulary vary from about 18,000 to 25,000 in various books, because writers have different views about what constitutes a distinct word.
It's common to see figures for vocabulary quoted such as 10,000-12,000 words for a 16-year-old, and 20,000-25,000 for a college graduate. These seem not to have much research to back them up. Usually they don't make clear whether active or passive vocabulary is being quoted, and they don't account for differences in lifestyle, profession and hobby interests between individuals.
David Crystal described a simple research project - using random pages from a dictionary - that suggests these figures are severe underestimates. He concludes that a better average for a college graduate might be 60,000 active words and 75,000 passive ones. But this method of assessing vocabulary counts dictionary headwords only; it would be possible to multiply it several-fold to include different senses, inflected forms, and compounds. Another assessment - of a million-word collection of American texts - identified about 38,000 headwords. Bearing in mind this was all general writing, this doesn't sound so different from David Crystal's estimates for graduate vocabularies.
Questions 1-7 : Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
Select
TRUE : if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE : if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN : if there is no information on this
1.
Vocabulary
is a word with a simple and universally accepted meaning.
A) TRUE
B) FALSE
C) NOT GIVEN
2. Shakespeare's vocabulary is easily assessed since we have all of his writings.
A) TRUE
B) FALSE
C) NOT GIVEN
3. A person's active vocabulary is more important for communication than their passive vocabulary.
A) TRUE
B) FALSE
C) NOT GIVEN
4. There are at least a million words in the English language.
A) TRUE
B) FALSE
C) NOT GIVEN
5. The definition of set in the Oxford English Dictionary takes 60,000 words.
A) TRUE
B) FALSE
C) NOT GIVEN
6. Most people agree that an active vocabulary is defined as words that a person uses regularly and accurately.
A) TRUE
B) FALSE
C) NOT GIVEN
7. Linguists have different views about what constitutes a distinct word.
A) TRUE
B) FALSE
C) NOT GIVEN
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D
8. A common figure quoted as the vocabulary of a 16-year old is
A) 11,000 words
B) 21,000 words
C) 60,000 words
D) 200,000 words
9. Verbs such as 'climb on' and 'climb over' are called
A) inflected forms
B) compounds
C) phrasal verbs
D) separate senses
10. A chiggy pig is a local British word for
A) bread yeast
B) a wood louse
C) a baby hog
D) a hamster
11. A word that is recognized when read by a person but never used is called
A) a separate sense
B) active vocabulary
C) passive vocabulary
D) the coining process
12. The number of words is a language is difficult to determine because
A) people disagree on what to list as separate words
B) people disagree on whether to count abbreviations
C) people disagree on whether to count proper names and places
D) all of the above
ref: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm
2024 IELTS Test Dates
IELTS Resources
IELTS Exam
IELTS Indicator
IELTS Results
How to register for IELTS?
Universities accepting IELTS in USA
Admission in UK universities without IELTS
Study in Australia without IELTS
How to score high in IELTS?
7 best books for IELTS
7 best apps for IELTS
How to prepare for IELTS in 30 days?
IELTS FAQs
IELTS Writing
How to prepare for IELTS writing section?
IELTS word list
IELTS Listening
How to prepare for Listening section?
IELTS Speaking
How to prepare for IELTS Speaking section?
IELTS Practice Tests/Reading
IELTS Practice Test - #1
IELTS Practice Test - #2
IELTS Practice Test - #3
IELTS Practice Test - #4
IELTS vs Other Test
IELTS vs TOEFL
IELTS/TOEFL score comparison/conversion
Duolingo vs IELTS
Subscribe to our newsletter