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  • Readers' Digest magazine first published (5-2-1922)

    From Ross Clark@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 5 11:42:41 2024
    It was inescapable when I was growing up in North America, though with education I came to view it as hopelessly lower-middlebrow.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest

    Crystal focuses on a regular feature called "It pays to increase your
    word power", which first appeared in 1945, written by "dictionary editor
    and lexical enthusiast" Wilfred J.Funk. (His son Peter took over after
    his death, and replaced "increase" with "enrich" in the title.)

    This leads on to the matter of vocabulary size. Crystal cites some figures:

    -150,000 entries in "medium-sized [English] dictionary"
    -50,000 words in passive vocabulary of most people (i.e. most people who
    take the trouble to estimate it, by means of dictionary sampling)
    -up to 100,000 for "well-read" people

    Active vocabulary? Much harder to estimate.
    "Samples suggest that our active vocabulary is likely to be about a
    third of our passive."
    That's a figure I hadn't heard before.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Aidan Kehoe@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 5 08:38:33 2024
    Ar an cúigiú lá de mí Feabhra, scríobh Ross Clark:

    It was inescapable when I was growing up in North America, though with education I came to view it as hopelessly lower-middlebrow.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest

    Crystal focuses on a regular feature called "It pays to increase your word power", which first appeared in 1945, written by "dictionary editor and lexical enthusiast" Wilfred J.Funk. (His son Peter took over after his death, and replaced "increase" with "enrich" in the title.)

    This leads on to the matter of vocabulary size. Crystal cites some figures:

    -150,000 entries in "medium-sized [English] dictionary"
    -50,000 words in passive vocabulary of most people (i.e. most people who take
    the trouble to estimate it, by means of dictionary sampling)
    -up to 100,000 for "well-read" people

    As an undergraduate I irritated one of my lecturers by coming up with the figure of 40,000 words as a normal vocabulary (based on the size of a normal learner’s bilingual dictionary, probably Hachette). He felt it was closer to 16,000. Nice to see support for my position!

    Active vocabulary? Much harder to estimate.
    "Samples suggest that our active vocabulary is likely to be about a third of our passive."
    That's a figure I hadn't heard before.

    And passive can become active easily enough, I’m sure we’ve all used a word we
    normally wouldn’t after our interlocutor did within the same conversation.

    It wasn’t a bad idea for a recurrent piece, vocabulary size correlates at 0.8 with general intelligence (the g of IQ tests), I’m sure many decision-makers even then noticed this in hiring and promoting people.

    --
    ‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
    How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
    (C. Moore)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)