What is the vocabulary of an average person?

Answer 1

average, i would say :)

Answer 2

Average Vocabulary

Answer 3

There is no settled figure of either what it is or how it's measured as the vocabulary of individuals vary wildly even if they're from the same town. Apparent vocabulary varies from region to region and country to country, as well as whether it's defined as words properly USED by a person or merely words UNDERSTOOD by that person. Typically, the more a person communicates (reading, writing, talking), the more they're exposed to new words and the higher their vocabulary eventually becomes. Word use usually lags far behind word comprehension in most people. People living in urban areas typically interact and communicate more than people living in rural areas, so typically, city dwellers have higher vocabularies than country dwellers just from the greater chance of exposure to new words.

When numbers are given, they vary wildly based on what is being measured, where the study was conducted, when it was conducted and the sample size. Some say that the average American's vocabulary is 10,000-12,000 words. Others say it's 60,000+ words. Much of the data is anecdotal. Much of it is dated (many numbers are taken from a 50 year old, U.S. study).

Based on recent studies which included vocabulary among other knowledge skills like math, writing and problem-solving, the consensus, is that the average vocabulary of Americans, along with their math and other problem-solving skills, is lower than the global average among all other industrialized countries. Further evidence suggests the average vocabulary among Americans has dropped by more than half since the 1950's despite there being thousands of more words in the language today than there were then.

Overall, the most accurate thing one can say about the average American's vocabulary is that it's less than that of people in other countries and less than what it used to be in Americans in the past - whatever the average is that's cited for any of them.

Sources:
- Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2013)
- McGraw-HIll
- The Journal of Experimental Education Vol. 32, No. 2, Winter, 1963

Answer 4

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RE:
What is the vocabulary of an average person?

Answer 5

Richard Lederer, a lion among linguistics, tells us that English is the most cheerfully democratic language in the history of mankind. It has 616,500 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. This compares with a vocabulary of about 185,000 words for German, 130,000 for Russian, and 100,000 for French. Yet the average English speaker possesses a vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words, Lederer observes, but actually uses only a fraction of that, the rest being recognition or recall vocabulary.

Answer 6

It is reasonable to say, then, that a literate adult knows somewhere around 50,000 words, if you count DRIVE, DRIVER, and DRIVES as separate words. But as I said, literacy and volume of reading is highly correlated with vocabulary size (e.g. Nagy and Anderson, 1984), so an adult that does not read habitually would have a much smaller vocabulary than an adult that reads voluminously. Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimated that an average high school senior knows 45,000 words, but other researchers have estimated that the number is much closer to 17,000 words (D'Anna, Zechmeister, & Hall, 1991) or 5,000 words (Hirsh & Nation, 1992). Surely these dramatically different estimates depend upon the three questions described above, namely, what does it mean to "know" a word, what counts as a "word," and who counts as "average?"

Answer 7

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It depends on a lot of things: the person, the environment, and their method of learning. Really hardcore people who live in Japan and study 5 hours a day (speaking, grammar, vocabulary, and reading) may learn it in a couple of years. People who aren't as serious about it will take much longer than that. But like I said, it depends. Some people will pick it up sooner than others. Those who can write Chinese may pick it up faster. I've found that the best way to really learn Japanese quickly is to actually live in Japan for several years. I took a summer school crash course before I left for Japan (6 hours a day). Yet I feel that my true education began when I lived there. I think it's important for your eyes to see and for your ears to hear Japanese everyday to learn faster. When/if you return to the US, the best way to maintain your Japanese is to get a job that forces you to speak it, or you will forget everything. My boyfriend's friend works as a translator/liason for Japanese journalists at Disneyland, so her Japanese is still in tip-top shape.

Answer 8

The average person has a total vocabulary of 40,000 to 50,000 words...

Answer 9

35%

Answer 10

a women can speek 7,000 words a day men has only 5,000