This is divided into two questions:
How many words are in the average person’s vocabulary?
Throughout a typical day, how many different words does an average person use?
- Depends mostly on your word input capacity. I have a high one myself wink. Over 100 at least
- There’s 86,400 seconds in a day. On average, it takes 1-5 seconds to say a word (if you know how to pronounce it correctly and/or if it’s a short or long word). So, if someone went from the beginning of the day to the end saying completely different words (probably using the dictionary), they would say 17,280-86,400 words
To answer your first question: Stephen Pinker’s book “The Language Instinct” tells about some researchers who figured the average American high-school graduate knows approximately 45,000 words. This is an underestimate because the researchers (Nagy and Anderson) excluded proper names, numbers, foreign words and acronyms. Pinker feels that if these types of words were included the total would be about 60,000.
Pinker states that most people know more words than they have an opportunity to use in everyday life. The brain reserves a lot of storage space and a particularly fast transcribing system just for a mental dictionary.
I’ve got no idea about your second question, though.
Just wanted to add that a person with more education or who was widely read would certainly have a larger vocabulary than 60,000 words.
So I’m assuming that multi lingual people would have vocabularies in the hundred thousand range?
yes
While I would love for someone to come along and prove me wrong, my first instinct says that you can’t simply add vocabularies from different languages to compute a total vocabulary. For instance: sure, the English word “soft” and the French word “doux” mean the same thing but are completely different words. But the English word “table” and the French word “table” also mean the same thing and appear to be the same word. (And a native speaker of either language will the store the second pair of words much differently than the first pair.
On a related note: Vocabulary in a second language is developed much the same as in a first language, but very few people have the vocabulary in any other language that can match their first language – this is one reason translation is so highly prized.
There is also a difference between having a large working vocabulary and being able to recognize and remember words when they are heard. I would say the AVERAGE man or womans working vocabulary is no more than 1,000 words not including names. Some of the guys at my job seem to have working vocabularies of even less, every other word being F this and F that, Sh%$ this, Da^% them, etc.
Ahh, I guess I am wrong- This site says the Average working vocabulary is 10,000 words. The average 14 year olds vocabulary in 1950 was 25,000. This sounds suspect, but who knows.
Oh, as a heads up- it is a pdf file.
palaver
The more words you know the more likely you will use more in a given day. But the percentage of your total vocabulary in daily use will likely go down as your vocabulary goes up.
As far as the average person’s vocabulary, I haven’t seen any statistically valid samples of average people. Actually, I haven’t seen any samples of average people period.
I have three
When you start talking about foreign languages, though, you bring up a whole mess of problems. Actually, even in English this will hold true: do you count tenses and conjugation as different words?
In English, let’s take the verb ‘to have’ : Have, has, and had (having being a noun too!). Are those 4 separate words, or 1? I say four. Have has a different context than had has, however had you counted has as the same as have, then we would be having a different conversation altogether. (Which, BTW, is a sentence that would be impossible to translate into many languages).
Slavic languages have a different twist for their words. The prefixes and suffixes of words determine their role within a sentence. ‘Mit’ is ‘to have’ in Czech, so that leaves us with:
Mit - to have
Mam - I have
Mas - you have
Ma - he, she, it has
Mame - we have
Mate - y’all have, or proper as in “Mate time Mr. President?”
Maji - they have
(no noun ‘having’ in Czech, but some verbs do- being is ‘byty’ for example)
So 1 verb has 7 (sometimes 8) different words which you have to remember in this f****d-up language. And I say that because I am a person who cannot Rote memorize for dink…so for me to learn 1 new verb requires memorizing 7 (8) different spellings, depending on usage. (yeah, there are general rules, but it still sucks)
And then you have the conjugation of nouns depending on usage…In Slavic languages there are cases (6 or 7), as well as sex (M, F, Nueter)…so the combinations are extreme, to say the least.
When you take these into consideration, I’d say that the number of words a multi-linguist knows actually reaches into the millions. But that might be an argument for how your brain stores information. Do you allocate a brain cell for every different spelling of a verb or noun, or do you have a base spelling that goes through some rule or filter? So all Czech verbs that end in -it have the -am -as -a -am -ate -aji ending, which is 1 verb brain cell plus 6 verb declination cells, or is each declination its own brain cell?
-Tcat
<homer> Mmmmm Brain Cells <homer>
And then there’s foreign phrases which are commonly used in English. Like “Soup du jour”, “Mi casa es su casa”, “Bon appetit”.
You don’t need to know a lick of a second language to know what these phrases mean. I’d say they count as part of your vocabulary.
- aa
- aardvark
- Aaronic
- abacus
[check back with me in about a year] 
Zev Steinhardt
Actually, I can imagine an easy (effortwise, not on the server) way to figure this out. If you just counted the unique words used on a message board, such as this, it’d give you a pretty decent estimate of the average vocabulary, although I’d be that it would run about 10% too high.
I’m sure that someone out there has a site of this volume that they’d be willing to take down for a day or so to allow a search like this to take place. It would be quite a contribution to science.
100 is terribly low, even lower then the average american’s vocabulary and believe me, the average american has a low (excuse me for my words) fucking vocabulary
Apparently, the best way to attack zombie threads is to flame them.
Zombies have a very limited vocabulary, considering how much brains they are working with.