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How many words does the average person know?
~42,000 words
How many words does the average person know?
Research using online vocabulary tests shows the average 20-year-old native English speaker knows roughly 42,000 word families (lemmas). By age 60, this grows to ~48,000. People learn about 1 new word per day from ages 6–18, then slow to roughly 1 per week for the rest of their lives.
Source: Brysbaert et al. (2016), Frontiers in Psychology
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Language & Vocabulary
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