Vocabulary means a list of words. Your vocabulary is all the words that you know. If you are a 5 year old you probably know about 5000 words. If you are an grown-up who has studied at university or college you may know at least 20000 words in your own language.

If you want to try to find out roughly how many words you know, you could look at about four pages in a dictionary and count how many of those words you know (count things like “sing”, “sang”, “sung”, “singing” as one word). Then see how many pages there are in your dictionary and do a sum to work out how many words you know.

It is difficult to be exact. Some words you may understand but you may not know them well enough to use yourself. Words that you use yourself are your “active vocabulary”. Words that you only understand are your “passive vocabulary”.

Sometimes it may not be easy to decide whether you understand a word. It may depend on the context. If you do not know the word “context” you may possibly have guessed that it means: the situation in which the word is being used. If I say: “I saw a chough yesterday” you have no idea what a chough is unless you already know. But if I say: “I saw a chough fly off from its nest” you will guess that it is a kind of bird (it’s pronounced “chuff” by the way).

If you know lots of words we say that you have a “wide vocabulary”.

It is good to develop a wide vocabulary. Knowing lots of words will help you to read and listen to people as well as to write and speak. The English language has a very large vocabulary indeed. This is because of Britain’s history. Every time Britain was invaded the new people brought new words. We have words from Celts, Anglo Saxons, Vikings, French as well as many from Ancient Greek and Latin. Many of these new words were used as well as the old ones, but with a slightly different meaning. For example: "pork" came from the old French word "porc" ("pig"), but it means a pig when it has become food.

In English difficult words may often be difficult to understand because they come from Latin or Greek and are difficult to guess. That last sentence has the word "difficult" three times, but if I put "hard" in one of those places instead the sentence will sound better. A wide vocabulary is useful.

Using big words does not always make your meaning clear. This “Simple English” website tries to use a small vocabulary. There is a lot that we can say in very simple ways.

Many years ago there was a British politician who spoke in parliament and who used so many big words that people found it hard to understand what he meant. Someone else got up and said to him: “You are intoxicated by the exuberance of your verbosity”. That was a clever remark and it has become a famous phrase (“intoxicated” means: “made drunk”, “exuberance” means “overflowing richness”, “verbosity” means using too many big words.)

See also

• grammar

Language

Wortschatz | Vocabulary | Vocabulario | Lessico | Vocabularium | 語彙 | Vocabulário | Ordförråd