Building vocabulary
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How many words?
How many words does the average native speaker know?More than 50,000 (?)
Well, the question is almost impossible to answer. To begin with, it depends on what you mean by a "word". Are stone, stoned, stony, stonewall, stone-wall different words? Lexicographers (experts on words) like to talk about word families with a head word and "relatives".
A person's vocabulary certainly depends on education. According to one expert, David Crystal of Oxford, graduate students in Britain "know" 60,000 to 75,000 words.
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