Shakespeare's vocabulary

[fenlan]

Shakespeare is said to have used justs over 20,000 words in his writings. The typical play contains 3000-4000 different words, but a lot of these are variations on the same word (do, done, doing etc). Attached is a list of his vocabulary ordered by frequency. The lowest frequency words come first.

[chenpv]

it seems that they are similar to the GRE wordlist, although i didnt make a thorough comparison. and how do you guys calculate your own vocabulary, i mean words like 'a' 'the' 'of', are they included? In China, the widespread opinion on GRE is that you should master 22000 at least which is always a headache for student. Few students go to extremes that they recite the whole little oxford dictionary (i tried this but failed, i just wanted to commit suicide when finishing N and part of M , now without any backup study, i believe i just throw most of them into the dust). Some days ago, i came across an essay that assumes an well-educated englishman will on average master about 50000 words, is that true? and how do you guys usually master an english word like coven or rash (an eruption of spots on the skin) or sinew etc which i believe i could seldom use?

[Mynheer Peeperkorn]

Well, rash is a fairly common word. Sinew and coven are less common, but sinew is probably learned in biology or another science class. I acutally hear the word sinew quite a bit because the word is found in the lyrics of a Decembereist's song. I believe the name of the song is Red Right Ankle. (The Decemberists is a band that write fantastic lyrics and their vocabulary far outstrips my own. For example, their latest album is called Picaresque. I thought the word was gibberish because i never even heard of that word, but i looked it up and found out that it actually was a word!)

I actually had to look up coven, but i remembered the word once i saw the definition. Most learn about the Salem Witch Trials in history class so that is likely where i picked up that word. Well, actually, i probably learned it from Halloween and horror movies.

Also, ill have to start studying GRE wordlists pretty soon as well, and I am definitely not looking forward to it. Vocab was never a strenght of mine. I cant imagine what it must be like for a non-native speaker to study GRE wordlists. Oh, and i have no idea how many words i know, and i have never tried to calculate my own vocabulary because it seems quite dull and painful.

[fenlan]

how do you guys calculate your own vocabulary, i mean words like 'a' 'the' 'of', are they included?

The answer is that native speakers rarely add up the number of words they know!! But did you see the list of the 10,000 most frequent words in British English? I think there are very, very few words in that list that the average native speaker would not know. At first glance, I only saw one word, "mucosal", that I had never seen before - but it is clearly related to the noun "mucous". And so I think a native speaker's vocabulary must be much larger than 10,000, and including all passive vocabulary is probably some 10s of 1000s. Yes, "and", "of" etc are all included. These lists should really include "lexical items" rather than words (thus, "do", "does", "did", "done" etc should be classed as variants of the same lexeme), but you need to have a quick look at the various lists available to see if this is the case.

Few students go to extremes that they recite the whole little oxford dictionary (i tried this but failed, i just wanted to commit suicide when finishing N and part of M , now without any backup study, i believe i just throw most of them into the dust).

Why did you start at N?

How do you guys usually master an english word like coven or rash (an eruption of spots on the skin) or sinew etc which i believe i could seldom use?

Well, you must remember that there is a closer connection between the pronunciation of a word and its written form in English than Chinese. Most Chinese say that they know lots of Chinese words that they can't write down, especially slang and other similar words. Some uneducated English people make a lot of mistakes in their spelling, but generally educated people can write every word they can say. So, this makes memorising words easier. Basically we don't have to go to any effort to learn rare words because of the approximately phonetic written script. Even though I have only seen the word coven a handful of times in print - you don't read about witches' covens every day in the newspapers - I think 90% of English people know what this word means. Rash is commonly used in spoken English and is therefore not a rare word. Sinew is not rare either, although not as commonly seen as rash. Chen PV, Shakespeare used a lot of words we no longer use today, so I don't think the list will correspond exactly to your GRE textbooks.

[gato]

In China, the widespread opinion on GRE is that you should master 22000 at least which is always a headache for student. Few students go to extremes that they recite the whole little oxford dictionary (i tried this but failed, i just wanted to commit suicide when finishing N and part of M , now without any backup study, i believe i just throw most of them into the dust). Some days ago, i came across an essay that assumes an well-educated englishman will on average master about 50000 words, is that true?

50,000 is too much. No wonder people give up. There're probably about 2000 SAT/GRE-caliber words you have know well for these tests. These are the somewhat more literary words like "arduous" or "assiduous". Both Kaplan and Princeton Review publish one of these more fine-tuned vocab study books. After learning these, or rather while you're learning these, it's best to work on your reading speed and comprehension by reading NYTimes/Economist-level texts rather than trying to memorize the whole dictionary. Vocabulary is only a small part of these tests.

[chenpv]

Why did you start at N?

fenlan, almost everybook on GRE here in china is a curtailed dictionary listing words from A to Z. its really boring to read 'abacus,abandon,abase, abashed,abate.....' from every book you pick up. and when it came to a dic, and you had to begin with 'a/A, 阿的瓦克，俄白克.....' oh, forget it.

Well, you must remember that there is a closer connection between the pronunciation of a word and its written form in English than Chinese.

although i have some confusion with spelling, but i think my problem is the incapability of burning their meanings clearly and steadily right into my mind.

[fenlan]

although i have some confusion with spelling, but i think my problem is the incapability of burning their meanings clearly and steadily right into my mind

Well, as you know it is a long time since I lived in China, but I do remember that the longer I lived there the easier it was to learn vocabulary, because as I got used to the Chinese sounds the words seemed more normal. In your own native language, one picks up words by osmosis without having to go to any great effort to learn them. In fact, when I learned French and Spanish it was similar. I just learned words by attending class; I scarcely had to study word lists out of class. But the characters stop me from learning that way in Chinese.