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Show ever, he used about 40,000 different words. This shows that vastly more words are used in writing than in speaking. A leading lexicographer estimates that the educated person of fair ability abil-ity understands on the average about 50,000 words, but uses only a small part of that number in either speaking speak-ing or writing. The mass of people know and use less than 8,000 words out of the 400,000 available. An interesting experiment is to inspect in-spect a few pages of an unabridged dictionary and count how many words out of a hundred you are really familiar fam-iliar with, both as to spelling and meaning. Try it. THE USE OF WORDS. How. often do we find difficulty in thinking of just the right word to express ex-press a certain idea? Even the greatest great-est writers must often stop to weigh their words in order to hit upon the most appropriate one, while few speakers can observe all the niceties of expression without writing out their speeches and memorizing them beforehand. This is not due to any lack of words in the English language, however. Possibly it may be a result of our having too many to choose from. The latest unabridged dictionaries contain more than 400,000 words, and the list is increasing constantly. Noah Webster's first dictionary, published in 1828, contained only about 70,000 words; the edition of 1864 included 114,000, and that of 1890 about 175,000, as compared with I the 400,000 recognized words today. Yet President Wilson, who was one of the foremost masters of English, in 75 different public addresses used a total of 6,221 different words. In three of his published books, how- |