Vocabulary

I have put together a list of about 5500 words. If we don't count slang expressions and "four-letter words," these are the most frequently used words in the English language. They are words every high-school graduate should know and they occur in textbooks written for college freshmen. I can say that with confidence because I went through dozens of introductory texts and counted the non-technical words. These are words you simply have to know in order to succeed in college. Most children know several thousand words before they start going to school. We can call these Level-1 words. They learn several thousand more words in the elementary grades and we can call these Level-2 words. About 4000 of these Levels-1-2 words are listed in the vocabulary. Level-3 words are ones that should have been learned by the tenth grade. About 900 such words are listed in the vocabulary and they can be identified because they are printed in lower-case letters but they have a very brief definition included. More advanced words at Level-4 are printed in capital letters in the vocabulary. These are ones college professors assume that you know. To summarize: Level 1 Preschool Level 2 Elementary School Level 3 Middle School Level 4 High school Graduate Some students ask why, if they already know several thousand words, they need to learn still more. A good answer is by analogy of adding lanes to paved roads. A 1-lane road is certainly much better than a path, but it doesn't handle two-way traffic very well. Adding a second lane is therefore a great improvement, but may still pose problems when cars want to pass. Adding a third lane reduces this problem somewhat, but it is adding a fourth lane that is necessary to permit a smooth flow of traffic in both directions. Vocabulary is like a road that carries information between people. Level-2 words are like a 2-lane road, and you can get along pretty well with that for many everyday purposes. But if you want to deal with heavy traffic of information, if you want to deal with complex ideas efficiently, you need a super-highway vocabulary. That means knowing words at levels 3 and 4. Good college professors do not use "big" words where little ones will do just as well. But we do use Level-4 words when it would take a long phrase of lower-level words to try to express the idea. (Beware of sources that count "words" instead of "ideas" and make the size of your lexicon seem very large. I have counted words like know/knew/known/knowing as only one idea. By adding prefixes (unknown) and suffixes (knowingly), one could make it seem that you know many thousand more words. To me, it is the number of non-verbal ideas that best measures the richness of your vocabulary.)