the.com/vocabulary
the secret wealth nobody can tax, inherit, or steal from your skull.
means The whole stock of words a person knows or uses, or the set of words belonging to a particular language, subject, or activity.
from From the Latin vocabulum, "a name, a designation," itself rooted in vocare, "to call" (a cousin of "voice" and "vocal"). Latin vocabularium meant a list of words, and the term arrived in English through that scholarly channel in the 1500s, first as a word-list and only later as the inner hoard each speaker carries.
- average adult
- Knows around 20,000 to 35,000 words.
- acquisition rate
- Children learn roughly one new word per waking hour.
- recognition gap
- You understand far more words than you ever speak.
- oldest word
- "Mother" traces back tens of thousands of years.
- Shakespeare
- Coined or popularized over 1,700 words still used.