{"id":4298,"date":"2015-04-20T06:41:03","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T10:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4298"},"modified":"2015-04-20T07:01:14","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T11:01:14","slug":"pump-up-your-vocabulary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4298","title":{"rendered":"Pump Up Your Vocabulary"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"words\"

(photo art by Darwin Bell, Creative Commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

Stuck in a rut when you\u2019re writing and want to find some fresh words for your ideas? Not sure where you stashed that dusty old thesaurus? If your vocabulary needs a bit of a boost, the Just English<\/a> website has produced a gaggle of synonyms for the 96 words that are most commonly used in English. While the list doesn\u2019t replace a thesaurus (online, I\u2019m a fan of Visual Thesaurus<\/a>), equally interesting is what those 96 words are.<\/p>\n

Who would guess these most frequently used words would include crooked, idea, neat, and predicament? Some of the commonly used words cited include alternative slang definitions, which undoubtedly increase their usage, but Just English doesn\u2019t provide synonyms for these.<\/p>\n

Anger, angry, awful, bad, fear\u2014they\u2019re all there. A few more alternatives for \u201cbad\u201d than for \u201cgood,\u201d but perhaps it means something positive that we have 27 alternatives for \u201cbeautiful,\u201d and only 19 for \u201cugly.\u201d<\/p>\n

By age four, children know some 5,000 words in their native language, and children of age eight know 10,000 words. The average adult who is a native English speaker has a vocabulary of 20,000 to 35,000 words, and most adults learn about one new word a day until middle age. The New York Times<\/em><\/a> is happy to help with that. A bit more challenging assortment can arrive in your email inbox from A.Word.A.Day<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Teens who read \u201clots\u201d have about twice the vocabulary of those who read \u201cnot much\u201d\u2014more than 20,000 words, versus about 10,000. While reading builds vocabulary, and people who read \u201ca lot\u201d throughout the lifespan have a bigger array of words in their communications repertoire than do non-readers, what <\/em>they read matters<\/a>. On average, people who read fiction \u201ca lot\u201d have larger vocabularies than people who do not\u2014even if they read a lot of non-fiction.<\/p>\n

You can test the size of your vocabulary<\/a> here. More than 5 million people have taken this test; I did, and my estimated vocab size is 37,000 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stuck in a rut when you\u2019re writing and want to find some fresh words for your ideas? Not sure where you stashed that dusty old thesaurus? If your vocabulary needs a bit of a boost, the Just English website has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Pump Up Your Vocabulary - How many words do you know?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,185,51],"tags":[89,414],"class_list":["post-4298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-language","category-words","tag-reading","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-17k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4298"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4304,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298\/revisions\/4304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}