OCR Text |
Show NO LACK OF I WORDS. How often do we find difficulty in thinking of just the right word to express ex-press a certain idea? Even the great-. great-. est writers often stop to weigh their words in order to hit upon the most j appropriate one, while few speakers can observe all the niceties of expression ex-pression without writing out their ' speeches and memorizing them beforehand. before-hand. These difficulties are 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,-000 400,-000 words, and the list is increasing constantly. Noah Webster's first dictionary, I published in 1828, contained only I about 70,000 words; the edition of ! 1864 included 114,000; that of 1890 about 175,000, as compared with the 1400,000 r' cognized words of today. A leading lexicographer estimates ! that Die educated person of fair ability abil-ity understand;) on an average of about 50,000 word;, but uses only a small part of that number in either speaking or writing. The mass of" the people know and use less than 8,000 words out of the 100,000 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, belli a:; to spelling and meaning. |