How many English words does an English speaker know?

how many English words does an English speaker know?

I guess somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000 - depending on your definition of “word” and “English speaker”. I googled the title of your thread and here´s one of the more interesting results: http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2013/02/how-many-words-does-average-native.html

It’s a big difference between ‘to know’ and ‘to use’- a native speaker can guess 50,000 words or more, but he\she really uses in a spoken language 2,000 words.

Where´d you get these numbers from? 2,000 words doesn´t sound like a lot.

“How many English words does an English speaker know?”

How long is a piece of string? There are all sorts of speakers out there. You have to be more specific.

As Paule89 mentioned, a quick Google search will reveal some very interesting results. According to some research (I’ll have to look up the source when I get home), native speakers don’t use much more than 5,000/6,000 words (or rather word families) on a daily basis. That is, allegedly, enough to understand 98% of what you usually hear or read.

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