OCR Text |
Show No Lack 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 speak-ers 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, lan-guage, however. Possibly it may be . a result of our having too many to choose from. The latest unabridged dictionaries contain more than 400,00) words and the list is increasing constantly. con-stantly. Noah Webster's firtt dictionary, published in 1828, contained only about 70,000 words; the edition of 1864 included in-cluded 114,000; that of 1890 about 175,000, as compared with the 400,000 recognized words of to-day. A leading lexicographer estimates that the educated person of fair ability abil-ity understands on an average about 50,000 words, but uses only a small part of that number in either speaking speak-ing or writing. The mass of the people peo-ple 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. |