Vocabulary facts for kids
A vocabulary is all the words a person knows and uses. It's like your personal collection of words!
When you are about five years old, you might know around 4,000 to 5,000 words. Adults who have gone to college often know more than 20,000 words. Your "hearing vocabulary" (words you understand when you hear them) and "reading vocabulary" (words you understand when you read them) are usually bigger. This means you understand many words that you might not use when you speak or write.
Contents
How Many Words Are in English?
The number of words in a language is huge! It's more than what you'll find in just one dictionary. One dictionary might list 500,000 words. Another dictionary could have different words that the first one doesn't.
If you combine words from many dictionaries, the English language has about 750,000 words. There might even be more! You might wonder, "If there are so many words, how can we talk with only a few thousand?" The good news is, you don't need to know every single word. You can say most things you want to with about 3,000 common words.
Common Words Are Short
It's interesting to know that the words we use most often are usually short. This is true for almost all languages. In English, the 50 most common words have fewer than seven letters. Half of these very common words have fewer than four letters! Think about words like "the," "is," "and," or "it." They are short and used all the time.
How Vocabulary Changes
The words in a language are always changing. New words are created, and old words can change their meaning over time. For example, words about computers, like "download" or "internet," are quite new to the English language. A newer word like "bling" came from hip hop music and culture.
Sometimes, words that have been around for a long time get new meanings. The word "cool" used to mean "a bit cold." Now, it can also mean "great" or "fashionable." This shows how languages are alive and always evolving!
Related pages
See also
In Spanish: Léxico para niños
