On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Casey Rousseau wrote: #David Dyer-Bennet responding to my question: #> > What's the count on Shakespeare's vocabulary vs the average #> > well educated speaker of American English? #> #> You're expecting our vocabulary to be as larger or larger, I presume? #> Could be. # #No. Actually, I expected it to be quite a bit smaller despite the vast #number of words introduced over the intervening four centuries. Perhaps #"working vocabulary" would be a better measure, since I'm certain that I use #many fewer words than I know. AAMOF, although I don't remember it I have seen counts of Willy's vocab, and IIRC it's impressively large when compared to the average USAian's working vocabulary. Remember that: 1. Anyone's recognition vocab is much larger than their production vocab. 2. The words introduced in the past four centuries have mostly been highly technical words that most of us wouldn't even recognize, let alone use. Lessee... pharyngealization, cytochrome, intertextuality... well, maybe in THIS crowd, but not to the average English speaker. 3. The gain of everyday words has been at least partly balanced by the loss of everyday words, not least as we move from rural low-tech to city hi-tech life. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel