We use them every day when we speak. We hear them on the TV and radio and we read them in the newspaper. They are the essence of language. They’re called words. From aa to zymurgy and everything in-between, we use them each day. A lot of them. But, do you really know how many words the average person uses? Each year, Websters adds “new” words to the dictionary. A book I have published over three decades ago estimated there were about 150,000 words in the English language. The next logical step is that someone had to do a study to estimate how many words each person uses. It’s an interesting breakdown. A child five years old uses only about one per cent, or 1,500 different words. From the first time a child utters “mommy” or “daddy” to an excited parent the race is on. You know the old saying, a parent teaches their children how to speak until about age six, then tries to get them to shut up until they leave home. Children do use those words a lot, however, as any parent would know. They speak about 1,000 words an hour so the total ranges from 7,000 to about 15,000 words spoken each day for more active children. Experts deemed this time period as the “silver age” for children. It’s not surprising as soon as a child enters school the count explodes. The child immediately knows more words but - surprisingly - speaks far less than they did as a younger child. At age 10, it’s is estimated children know about 7,000 words but use only 30 per cent of them in daily speaking. And, he speaks less by using, on average, only 700 words per hour or 300 less than a few years ago. College or university education makes us a lot smarter but we don’t put that knowledge to good use. For most, our vocabulary grows to around 20,000 words but we only use a scant 10-20 per cent of them. Or, taking the happy medium at 15 per cent, we use only about 3,000 different words. It seems like a lot of words but when you consider there are at least 150,000 words it means most of us don’t use 147,00 words available in our language. What a waste! It is estimated that a journalist uses 6,000 words in his articles but that is still only four per cent of the total. Next time a journalist tries to tell you how much they know about the English language, toss that fact out! It begged the question: how many words did the geniuses of our time use? French poet and novelist Victor Hugo topped the list with 38,000 words used. Playwright William Shakespeare used only 24,000 words at his disposal making him a mere “rookie” compared to Hugo. Roman poet Horace used only 4,600 words and ranked below the lowly journalist. Many of us use the same words over and over. See! I just did it! What the study doesn’t tell you is that you don’t need all 150,000 words to make you intelligent. Rather, it’s the use of the words you know and how well you communicate them to others. It is interesting to note that as we age, we may discover new words but we frequently never use others. When was the last time you used tangent or cosine in a sentence? Now, after all those boring facts, here are three words most precious to most of us. Silence is golden!

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