Is your vocabulary up to scratch? In Words, Words, Words, a new book published by Oxford University Press on 19 January, Britain's leading word expert brings comfort to those who feel challenged by the English language.
David Crystal has been fascinated by words since his first day at a Welsh primary school, aged four. Some six decades later, he sums up a lifetime's study in Words, Words, Words - a celebration of what we say and how we say it.
Britons, David Crystal suggests, usually underestimate the extent of their vocabulary. He set out to prove it by asking a random group of people the number of words they think they actively use. Their answers ranged from just 5,000 to 20,000. In fact, it is unusual to find someone with an active vocabulary of less than 35,000 words! Add to that the words known to us but which are not in day-to-day use and our vocabulary is likely to be at least 75,000 words, and probably a lot more.
Take a medium-sized dictionary - one between 1,500 and 2,000 pages.
Choose a sample of pages that is exactly 2% of the whole.
Break the sample down into sections. For example, if you have a 30-page sample make six choices of five pages each or ten choices of two pages (it wouldn't be sensible to take a 30 page sample from the letter U!). A good representative sample would be words beginning with CA-, EX-, JA-, OB-, PL-, SC-, TO-, and UN-.
Begin with the first FULL page of each section you choose. Consider every word and decide if you know it. If you do, ask if you 1) would actively use it (this is your active vocabulary) or 2) know the word but would not use it yourself (this is your passive vocabulary). You don't need to know all the different meanings of each word - even one will do. Consider all the versions of each word, for example, nation, national, nationalize, nationalization, and phrases and idioms, but ignore alternative spellings.
When you have considered each word in your 2% sample, add up ticks for your active vocabulary, and ticks for your passive vocabulary on each page, and then add up the grand total of your 2% sample. Multiply by 50 and this will give the approximate size of your active vocabulary and your passive vocabulary.
The grand total will give you the approximate scope of your everyday vocabulary (of course, it won't take account of a dialect or specialist vocabulary that many of use have). Whatever your total, David Crystal believes that it will be larger than you think!
Words, Words, Words also investigates our continual fascination with words - what they say about who we are, where we come from, and what we do, and how they continue to shape our lives. From the 100 most frequently used words in the language (from the to find) to the 50 most beautiful ones (mother to kangaroo) and those that TV regards as taboo, David Crystal takes us on a journey through language old and new.
He tells us about wordbeginnings, wordlore, wordloans, wordbuilding, wordspells and wordsounds, wordbirths, worddeaths, wordchanges and wordfutures.
But where do new words come from? One place is the World Wide Web, or as David Crystal suggests it should be called, Word Wide Web. The new way to say someone doesn't know the answer, ie 'Richard's got a 404 look on his face', comes from Cern in Switzerland where the WWW was devised. '404 Error' means 'file not found' but today you are more likely to say someone's gone 404!
Some new words die by the roadside; others might become eligible for inclusion in that great repository of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary.
And which words go out of fashion? Bling bling was a hip word of the nineties but the takeover of the word by the middle classes has made it no longer cool to the rapping community.
Can you tell a snarl word from a purr word? Words can be loaded, particularly in these days of political correctness, when they touch on race, gender, sexual affinity, or ecology. But they can also be the linguistic equivalent of a feline purr.
Hippotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia! Don't fear long words but take David Crystal's advice on how we can turn a casual interest in words into something more substantial - it will prove fascinating.
And lastly, David Crystal shows how we can each become our own word-detective, and make our own enquiries.
About the author
David Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on language. He held a chair at the University of Reading for 10 years, and is now Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. He is the author of over 100 books.
Words, Words, Words publishes on 19 January 2006, price £12.99 hardback.
To interview David Crystal, please contact Sarah Kidd on 01865 353911 or email sarah.kidd@oup.com