- People with college degrees tend to have larger vocabularies.
- Estimated vocabulary size for people with doctorates, run up to 100,000 words.
- Native English speakers and those born to native English speakers tend to have larger English vocabularies.
- People tend to increase their vocabularies through middle age.
The King James Bible uses about 8,000 headwords. Shakespeare's works use about 20,000.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary contains over:
263,000 main entries
Most experts count run and running as two forms of the same word. You might think of it as counting headwords in the dictionary.
Words that are spelled and pronounced the same, but have different meanings (such as the bark of a dog, or the bark around a tree) are typically treated as different words.
Nation, national, and nationalize are traditionally counted as three different words. Similarly, unsatisfactory is traditionally counted as a separate word than satisfactory.
Proper nouns and acronyms such as New York City, Shakespeare, and the FBI all impart generally shared verbal concepts, but experts are divided on whether they include them when estimating vocabulary size.