On The South Bank Show in January 2000 a contributor said excitedly, ‘Shakespeare invented a quarter of our language.’ Rubbish. I found that reference, and its refutation, in a new book by the indefatigable Professor David Crystal, The Stories of English (Allen Lane, £25). First, he asks, how big is an Englishman’s vocabulary? Dr Crystal says he has lost count of the times he has been told that the Sun uses a vocabulary of 500 words. His reckons an average issue contains 6,000 different words (or ‘lexemes’, i.e., words stripped of bolt-on features).
Academics, by inviting respondents to look through a slice of dictionary, say that an average English speaker uses 50,000 words actively and understands a quarter more. Shakespeare uses just over 29,000. That doesn’t give Shakespeare ‘learning difficulties’, for we have only a small sample of his writing, and since his day English vocabulary has swollen to well above 400,000 words.
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