It ’s easy to palpate like a Mensa member when you ’re discussing political science with that eldritch relative over Thanksgiving dinner . Then it feels like you do n’t experience any quarrel at all when you ’re forced to make small talk with a co - worker at a forced social role . But how many words do you actually know ?
An expansive newfangled sketch published byFrontiers in Psychologyhas taken on that impossible task . The researchers set out to forecast just how many Word of God the average individual knows and discovered by long time 20you know around 42,000 words . As you age , you gain about one new word every two days , meaning that by long time 60 you ’ve acquired an additional 6,000 countersign .
" Our research got a huge button when a telecasting station in the Netherlands require us to organize a countrywide study on vocabulary knowledge , " says wind researcher Professor Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University in Belgium . " The test we developed was featured on TV and , in the first weekend , over 300 thousand Dutch speakers had done it . "
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The subject field was done by volunteers online and quickly became so popular that the researchers develop versions in English and Spanish . It gave the team an unprecedented amount of data to form with .
Users were asked whether or not the word shown to them on the cover was real or not . 100 words were evidence , with 70 of them being real and another 30 being random Holy Writ - similar assemblages . The words were take from a list of 62,000 words compose by the researcher . That means just becausethe OED has included YOLO and clickbaitdoesn’t needs intend they ’re included here . So , you may say you know 42,002 if you want .
accumulate the list themselves made it not open to copyright restrictions and gave them the ability to expand the research and apportion the listing with other research worker .
The ramifications of the findings are substantial . " In Dutch , we have see that this explains a circle about word processing times . mass respond much quicker to parole hump by all hoi polloi than to word of honor make out by 95 % of the population , even if the words used with the same absolute frequency , " suppose Brysbaert . " We are confident that word preponderance will become an important variable in parole recognition enquiry . "
The data point could help researcher better understand the spread of terminology , how language is acquired , and how new language are learned . It will also avail you feel ranking to your fellow man when you pass the next two weeks coursing a lexicon to figure outexactlyhow many words you know .
