Average English vocabulary. Minimum vocabulary - how much?

If you're looking at the Oxford Dictionary right now and thinking, "I'll never learn that many words!" - take your mind off sad thoughts and read this article. How many words do you really need to know? You might be pleasantly surprised!

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English students often ask, “How many words should I learn to be able to carry on a conversation on any topic?” Good question, but before answering it, let me ask another: what do you think? A question for which there is no clear answer. Why? It is impossible to count the number of words in a language for one simple reason - it is difficult to decide what is considered a word.

It is said, for example, that for the word “set” the Oxford Dictionary gives 464 interpretations. Should a polysemantic word be considered one word or should each interpretation be considered a separate word? And what to do with ( phrasal verbs): “set up”, “set about”, “set apart”, etc.? What about the so-called open compounds - words like “hot dog”, “ice cream”, “real estate”? Add to this the forms of the singular and plural, verb conjugations, different endings, prefixes and suffixes - and you will understand why it is so problematic to answer how many words there are in the English language.

In fact, the question should be posed like this: “Do you know how many words are in the largest dictionary in English? If you roughly imagine the number of words in a language, it can be compared to the number of words used 90-95% of the time in everyday speech and in the news.

Talk less, work more

In 1960, the famous American children's writer Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss, author of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” “The Cat in the Hat,” “The Lorax,” etc.) published the book “Green Eggs and Ham.” The book was written using only 50 words and was the result of a dispute between Seuss and his publisher, Bennett Cerf. The publisher believed that Seuss would not be able to create a finished work under such harsh conditions (Seuss had previously written “The Cat in the Hat,” which had 225 words).

If it's possible to write a book using just 50 words, does that mean we don't need a 40,000-word vocabulary to communicate with each other? Note, however, that according to Susie Dent, a lexicographer, the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is approximately 20,000 words, and the passive vocabulary is about 40,000 words.

What is the difference between active and passive vocabulary? To put it simply in simple language, active vocabulary includes words that you can remember on your own and apply. As for passive vocabulary, then these are the words that you recognize, the meaning of which you know, but which you are not able to use yourself.

How many words do you know, sir?

And here we come to the most interesting part. On the one hand, an adult native English speaker has an active vocabulary of about 20,000 words. On the other hand, The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists states that the first 25 words are used in 33% of everyday written texts, the first 100 words are used in 50%, and the first thousand words appear in 89% of such texts!

Thus, we can safely say that only 3000 words cover about 95% of texts on general topics (news items, blog posts, etc.). Liu Na and Nation proved that 3000 is the approximate number of words we need to know in order to understand the rest from the context when reading unsimplified texts.

Do the math yourself!

The Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 common words. 95% of texts on general topics cover a vocabulary of only 3000 words. That's 1.75% of all words!

That's right: knowing 1.75% English dictionary, you will be able to understand 95% of what you read. This is only 7.5% of the average passive vocabulary of a native speaker (40,000 words). Isn't it great?

About Pareto's law and the importance of linguistic guesswork

Mobile version for iPhone:

An alternative from the creators of Merriam-Webster's 3,000 Core Vocabulary Words:

How to Assess Your Vocabulary

So, even though a native English speaker has an active vocabulary of 20,000 words and a passive vocabulary of 40,000, learning English will be successful if you only learn 3,000 words!

95% of texts on general topics will become accessible to you, and the remaining 5% you will understand intuitively. Good luck with your studies!

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Assessing the number of words learned and remembered in a foreign language is primarily interesting for understanding how far a person has progressed in the “passive” perception of information: texts, speech, films, etc. I suggest you familiarize yourself with several methods that I used, found on the Internet and “homemade”. Below are a couple of tests for assessing vocabulary, a technique for finding important words that have not yet caught on in the brain, several arguments and some links.

Online tests

You know at least 10,500 English word families!

What do my results mean?

In general, there is no minimum vocabulary size. Language ability is related to vocabulary size, so the more words you know, the more you will be able to understand. However, if you want to set a learning goal, Paul Nation's (2006) research suggests that the following sizes might be useful:

How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening?
Skill Size estimate Notes
Reading 8,000 - 9,000 word families nation (2006)
Listening 6,000 - 7,000 word families nation (2006)
Native speaker 20,000 word families Goulden, Nation, & Read (1990)
Zechmeister, Chronis, Cull, D'Anna, & Healy (1995)

What is a word family?

There are many different forms of a word, so this test measures your knowledge of the most basic form of a word and assumes that you can recognize the other forms. For example, nation, a noun, can also be an adjective (national), a verb (nationalize), or an adverb (nationally). There are also forms which can be made with an affix such as de- or -ing which also modify the way that the word is used or adds to the basic meaning. For a test of receptive vocabulary knowledge such as this one, word families are considered to be the most accurate way of counting words.

Frequency dictionaries

Something like this:

Rank Word Part of speech Frequency Dispersion

1 the - a 22038615 0.98
2 be - v 12545825 0.97
3 and - c 10741073 0.99
4 of - i 10343885 0.97
5 a - a 10144200 0.98
6 in - i 6996437 0.98
7 to - t 6332195 0.98
8 have - v 4303955 0.97
…
…
4996 immigrant - j 0.97
4997 kid - v 5094 0.92
4998 middle-class - j 5025 0.93
4999 apology - n 4972 0.94
5000 till - i 5079 0.92

The file contains 5000 English words, sorted by frequency of occurrence. The frequency was calculated on a huge heterogeneous array of English texts. Recently I saw a friend of mine looking up words he didn't know while testing his vocabulary. After looking through the first 500, I didn't find any unknown ones. He showed an extract on his smartphone - about a dozen words from the second thousand (that is, from 1000 to 2000) and about 20 from the third. It's funny that as you go through the list, you come across sequences of words that successfully form phrases or even short sentences. The logic is very simple - if a word is very common according to statistics, and you don’t know it, then it’s better to learn it and look at examples of use.

After reading the list of words unknown to him (already with a translation), I saw the following thing. I knew about 50-60% of these words unknown to him, but some of the meanings of the translations recorded there were unknown to me, there were several words completely unknown to me.
In general, the site is trying to be commercial, they sell lists longer than 5000, but this is no longer so interesting.

So far, this friend of mine is writing a program with a convenient interface for searching for unknown words - for learning purposes. For a global assessment, I suggested that he use not this list, but a thinned one: every seventh word from a total list of 60,000 words is given. In fact, even viewing the first couple of thousand makes you despondent; not everyone will get to 5000. Although I can’t say 100 percent, a thinned dictionary will probably show at least one word from the “family”, and the time spent will be 7 or 10 times less (depending on the frequency of thinning).
By the way, such frequency dictionaries of the Russian language contain about 160 thousand words, including abbreviations and abbreviations. There are several different similar "corpora" of English words from different organizations.

I'm interested in another question: how accurate are the tests that estimate the number of words you know? It is possible that this could be determined precisely through a check of the frequency dictionary, as well as by comparing the list of selected unknown words - their number and occurrence in different “families”.

Eat general laws remembering and forgetting. One of the main things: if a person has learned something and does not repeat it, does not use it, the information is forgotten exponentially over time. On the other hand, several repetitions lengthen and stretch the falling exponent to an acceptable level. I was very surprised when an acquaintance who worked part-time as a tutor for schoolchildren said that there is a sequence of time intervals for deep memorization: say, after 20 minutes, then after 8 hours, another day, etc., after which the information is firmly implanted in the brain . That is, the brain provides a statistically maximum level of excitation signal when encountering this information.

Ebbinghaus curve, from Wikipedia.

How I learned words at the institute.

The well-known Ellochka from the novel “12 Chairs” easily managed with thirty words of Russian, but, apparently, great success I never achieved it in my life. How many words do we need to know in English in order to communicate in everyday life? professional themes? According to researchers, about 40 words are the minimum required for 50% of understanding and speaking in everyday speech situations, 400 words should be enough for 90% of cases, and 1000 words will provide you with 95% of successful communication. Native speakers use on average from 3,000 to 20,000 words, this depends on the level of education of each individual and the typical situations in which he has to communicate. Practice shows that for English learners it is enough to master 1500-2000 words to feel confident in a conversation. As for professional terms, they usually do not cause difficulties, because in most cases they are international vocabulary. But the most important thing is to understand that words should not just be written out on beautiful cards and hung throughout the house, they should become your working tools. Let's see what steps will help you firmly grasp the necessary vocabulary, that is, the vocabulary.

1. Read carefully and draw conclusions

Whatever you read—fiction, stock market news, or a gardening blog—pay attention to how words are used and what combinations they make. Highlight, write down, copy what seems useful to you. For example, here is an excerpt from the article “How to Become an Early Riser” (by Steve Pavlina):

It seems there are two main schools of thought about sleep patterns. One is that you should go to bed and get up at the same times every day. It’s like having an alarm clock on both ends - you try to sleep the same hours each night. This seems practical for living in modern society. We need predictability in our schedules. And we need to ensure adequate rest.

How can we analyze what we read?

• “It seems” - it seems, apparently. We just use it as an introductory word.
• “This seems practical” - it seems practical. We understand that after “seems” an adjective is used, and now we can speak by analogy: “This seems interesting”, “This seems stupid”, “Your ideas seem nice”.
• "Predictability" - predictability. If we know that “predict” means to predict and “ability” means ability, then we can calculate the meaning of this word.

2. Watch the video with and without subtitles

The same work can be done when watching your favorite movies, TV series and TV shows. If you use subtitles, it will be more convenient for you to write down the phrase you like; if not, then train your auditory perception, pause and repeat after the speaker. We can recommend an excellent resource that provides the opportunity to watch TV series in the original with super-useful subtitles: when you hover over a word, a Russian translation appears. Saves a lot of time and improves memorization.

3. Sing your favorite songs

We have already discussed how songs can help us learn English. Expanding vocabulary is one of the tasks where songs can be used especially successfully. It is always much easier to remember what you like and what is associated with positive emotions. On the Internet you can find a lot of sites with song lyrics, for example:

Listening to your favorite songs and singing along with the performers, you learn entire phrases easily and with pleasure.

4. Let's take cues from celebrities

Search for something like “Brad Pitt interview” or “chat show with celebrities” and you’ll get a ton of material for independent work. As you read or listen to excerpts from the interviews, you will likely notice that certain words are used more often. For example, “amazing” is a very popular adjective to express delight:

• “You look amazing!”
• “The film was amazing!”
• "It was an amazing experience."

5. Mastering typical phrases for standard situations

If you love to travel, you will probably need a set of certain phrases and expressions that you may need at the airport, at customs, at a hotel, in a store, etc. As you know, such conversations are not particularly diverse, so for greater confidence you can learn several mini-dialogues in necessary topics. Various Internet resources will help you with this, where audio recordings and texts are collected, as well as assignments for them. For example, you can start from this site

6. We study words by topic

It is much easier to remember new words that are related in meaning. If, for example, you are studying the topic "Food", you just need to learn the names of different products, ready meals, adjectives to describe them, etc. By discussing assignments with your teacher, you will be able to activate these words, i.e. transfer from a passive stock to a set of “working tools”. Studying will be more effective if you use different types memory: look at the pictures, listen to the pronunciation and repeat yourself. Use, for example, this resource, which will help you do all of the above and learn new words with ease.

7. Use dictionaries

In our age information technologies paper dictionaries are no longer popular, and even schoolchildren readily use their online versions. Starting from the Pre-Intermediate level, it is recommended to use the so-called “English-English dictionaries”, that is, do not translate unfamiliar words, but look for their definitions in English. In addition, dictionaries can provide you with a supply of synonyms, antonyms and idioms that include a given word. According to Wikipedia, the following dictionaries are the most useful and reliable sources of information:

8. Play word games

Crosswords, gallows, Scrabble and other games can also help you enrich your speech because they help you remember the spelling of words you know in a fun way. Additionally, many word games can be played in fun company, combining business with pleasure: learning English with friendly communication. Tip for the curious: try playing Scrabble with an open dictionary.

9. We arm ourselves with devices and gadgets

It takes a long time to write words on cards, there is no time to make sentences, but we always have smartphones, iPhones and other devices at hand. When you have a free minute, you can start learning new words, and you don’t need to carry any pieces of paper, printouts, or textbooks with you. If you don’t know which application to choose, use advice from British Council experts.

10. Use it or lose it!

The most important thing in mastering vocabulary is to use it in your speech. Passive vocabulary is good for reading and listening, that is, for recognizing words. To speak and write, we need to learn to retrieve words from memory very quickly, and this can only be achieved with practice. According to researchers, for a word to become active in speech, it must be used in various contexts about 17 times. Therefore, before class, set yourself the task of speaking more than the teacher and be sure to use new words.

Big and friendly EnglishDom family

Hi all! Each language contains a certain number of lexemes. The complete English vocabulary is about 300,000 words. Of course, such a figure will discourage a beginner from learning a foreign language. However, I hasten to reassure you that you will not need to learn all these lexemes, since even educated speakers have an arsenal of approximately 100,000 words. Today we will find out how many English words you need to know to speak English fluently.

Minimum vocabulary There are methods of learning English in which students are forced to learn up to 200 words every day. For some, this approach is applicable, but for the majority, these numbers remain incomprehensible, and the learned words do not bring them closer to free communication with native speakers. In my opinion, the best organization of classes is, on the contrary, saving words, that is, remembering less, but more effectively.

You shouldn’t chase quantity; your prerogative should be quality. It is much better if you know 1000 words by heart than to know 3000-4000 lexemes poorly. Each teacher determines his own minimum required number of lexemes. But only you can decide how many words you need to know so that they are necessary and sufficient to achieve your goals. Experience shows that a minimum vocabulary of 450 correctly selected lexemes can compensate for about 90% of the vocabulary arsenal necessary for free everyday communication in English. For a comfortable English reading

, it will take a little more words, but passively. With knowledge of approximately 1600 lexemes, you will be able to navigate freely in literary and journalistic texts.
The famous teacher, polyglot and methodologist E. Gunnemark made calculations of the necessary vocabulary for the English language, dividing them into several categories.

• Thus, he calculated that for oral speech it would be enough to learn from 40 to 1000 correctly selected, most frequent words:
• 40 lexemes will cover about 50% of everyday uses in communication
• 200 words will already raise this figure to 80%
• 300 lexical units will add a few more percentages - 85%
• 450 words is almost 90%

900-1000 - almost 98% of what you can say or hear in everyday conversation Please note that these indicators are not exact calculations, but about how many units you need to remember in order to feel confident when communicating with native English speakers. E. Gunnemark The famous polyglot found out that for reading, you will need to select and learn about 80 - 8000 high-frequency words in order to understand ordinary simple text:

• 80 words will help you understand about 50% of the text
• 200 units - 60%
• 400 tokens - will cover about 70%
• 2000 words - approximately 90%
• 8000 lexical units will help you understand written or printed text 100%

Again, these are just indicative numbers. In some cases, you will be able to understand the text knowing only 45 words, while in others you will not have enough knowledge of even 1,000.

Why know 100,000 words?

You may ask, why are 100,000 words needed if only a few thousand are enough to communicate? On the one hand, you are right - this number of lexemes is quite enough for everyday conversations. BUT is the minimum vocabulary. If you want to become a full-fledged, educated member of society who will be able to hold a conversation on any topic that a native English speaker suggests, then you need to constantly increase your vocabulary. Rich vocabulary What does a rich vocabulary give:

• 350−700 words - enough for language proficiency at a threshold level
• 800−1200 tokens - active arsenal for communication or passive reading for beginners
• 1500−2500 units - confident reading or free communication on everyday topics
• 3000−7000 words - free reading of specialized literature and the press
• 8000−9000 lexemes - full oral and written communication, reading any kind of literature
• 10,000−40,000 words - active vocabulary of the native speaker
• 50,000−100,000 units - a passive arsenal of words for an educated English speaker

Thus, for you, as a foreigner, knowing 9,000 English words will be enough to confidently study, work and live among English speakers.

I will also note that knowledge of this vocabulary alone does not guarantee you free communication. To be able to speak foreign language, requires practice and constant training, knowledge of basic knowledge English grammar and syntax.

As for international vocabulary and special terms, you should not have any particular difficulties here. Since it is enough to check these words once with the term in native language and remember.

Core Vocabulary Levels

In pedagogical practice, teachers and linguists distinguish several levels of basic vocabulary, which serve as a guide for beginners. They significantly reduced the huge gradation by creating a list of three main levels:

• Level A— basic vocabulary and phrases — 350 — 500 lexemes. This amount is sufficient to cover about 85−90% of all uses in daily oral conversation, or approximately 70% plain text in a written form
• Level B- mini-level or minimum vocabulary and phrase stock - 900 -1000 units. This number is enough to cover approximately 95% of usage in everyday spoken conversation and approximately 85% of simple printed text.
• Level C— media level or average vocabulary arsenal — 1200−2000 words. This amount is enough to compensate for almost 100% of the use of phrases in everyday oral communication or approximately 90% of literary text

According to this gradation, a beginner needs 2,000 words for everyday communication in English. Again, I note that everything is relative, and only you determine for yourself how many English words you need to know. But also overload yourself big amount There is no need for unnecessary information either.

Every even remotely serious lover of anything in the world sooner or later has a desire to measure his collection: in money, in volume, in quantity... The philatelist carefully blows the dust off the hundredth stamp in the album, Henry Ford polishes the new one to a shine tire, Rockefeller glances at the number of zeros in the amount stored in the bank, etc. How to be an English lover? Love for English can also be measured. The hours devoted to studying? Words that make up an active vocabulary!

Supplies vary

No, not firewood for the winter or sweets under the pillow, as you already understood, but English words in the vocabulary. There is nothing shameful or boastful about measuring your vocabulary: after all, there is no limit to perfection, but there are intermediate stages along the way.

Statistics, supported by practice, say that to freely express your thoughts in English you only need 2000 words. Statistics, also supported by optimism, put the figure at 1000-1500 words, and the creators of Basic English are wizards and ours best friends- only 850 words. Realists and optimists, hold off on your skepticism! Basic English is divided into thematic groups of words (objects and phenomena, actions and movements, expression of qualities) - original selections of the most hit examples from each category. In fact, frequently used, mostly monosyllabic words (514 out of 850), easy to remember and pronounce, were selected.

We would like to ask everyone who relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief after the figures were announced: what do you personally mean by the concept of “expressing yourself freely”? Of course, asking for a window seat at an airport check-in counter or ordering a veal chop at a restaurant requires 2,000 words. Diving begins where, when answering a question, you do not understand the meaning of the unfamiliar words spoken or cannot talk about specific gastronomic preferences in the company of gourmets. And then we multiply 2000 by two and get 4000 words, which will certainly allow you not to lose face and keep up your conversation in English.

One more nuance: so far we have been talking about active vocabulary, i.e. layer of those words that you regularly use when speaking. What you once wrote down in a dictionary and, on occasion, perhaps (!) remember the meaning, is called passive stock - words that you seem to know, but most lie on the shelves of memory under a layer of dust. Yes, they fall into the general standings, but they don’t bring any special dividends.

Perfectionists hungry for more! Outside the language environment, learning the 8,000 words that make up the active vocabulary of an English-speaking citizen is quite difficult. It is possible, of course, but with great energy consumption, diligence and methodicalness. With a luggage of 4-5 thousand words, you can safely pack your bags to Britain, the USA or Canada, where you are doomed to expand your vocabulary to the treasured 8-10 thousand units.

Gradations of vocabulary

Or how much is needed for complete happiness? You can start with the top 10 or top 100 words in the English language and be happy. A selection of the most commonly used English words around the world will set the desired vector for replenishing your vocabulary. And we again pick up the ruler and return to simple arithmetic, this time introducing you to gradations (types) of vocabulary.

400-500 words of active vocabulary - a pass into the world of English and a certificate of language proficiency in basic level
. 800-1000 “active” words will give you the opportunity to explain yourself and speak in household topics, the same amount of “passives” will allow you to read simple texts
. 1500-2000 words of “assets” will reward you with the opportunity to freely communicate throughout the day or the same amount of “passives” - confident reading of more complex texts
. 3000-4000 words bring you closer to almost fluent reading of newspapers or books and magazines in your specialty
. 8000 words guarantee full communication for the average European. This is also enough for free reading and expressing thoughts in writing.
. up to 13,000 words characterize a highly educated person learning English as a foreign language.

How to determine and test English vocabulary?

Find out on the accounts? Marking familiar words in the dictionary? Let's not reinvent the wheel and borrow the answer from the creators of a test that can weigh your vocabulary in 2-3 minutes with an error of up to 10%. There will be a link to the test in a minute, but for now there will be brief instructions on how to use it and the answer to the question “how does it work.”

The developers took a dictionary of 70,000 words as a basis, discarded outdated, compound words, scientific terms and derivatives of each other, resulting in 45,000. Then they sorted them by frequency of use, sincerely admitting that the last 10,000 out of 45,000 are extremely rare, so even a respectable Briton may not feel remorse without ever using them in his life. From the English vocabulary test, words whose meaning could be obtained through logic were excluded.

The entire test consists of two pages: each contains English words in several columns without any logical sequence. If you know at least one of the possible meanings of a word, then confidently put a tick next to it. The task is the same on two pages, only on the second the program selects words from unfamiliar ones from the first page, as if wanting to make sure whether you really don’t know them. No sleight of hand, no cheating: the only condition is to be honest with yourself and not overdo the number of ticks.

We invite you to take the test for a couple of minutes, and then return to our article for a debriefing. We have already prepared a line :)

We measure ourselves by results

And now you are left alone with your test result. How did others cope? Statistics collected after passing this test say that among non-native speakers, the majority of respondents ended up with between 3 and 7 thousand words. There are noticeably fewer holders of 7-10 thousand words and even fewer from 11 to 30 thousand (strangely enough, even 30-thousand people paid attention to this test).

Among those for whom English is native, the situation looks different: a cosmic vocabulary of 30 thousand words for non-native speakers is the norm for 30-year-old English-speaking friends. The average result of the previous category of 3-7 thousand is typical for children 5-6 years old. Do not forget that it is precisely at this age that the world is actively being explored and the entire surrounding family with 30 thousand deposits around is actively not silent.

Let's sum it up