Articles and Stories

March 26, 2015

The Oxford English Dictionary was first printed in the 19th century with four volumes and had only 6,400 pages and had plans for expanding to only a total of 10 volumes. Now, according to The Herald of Sharon, PA, the dictionary has 414,800 words listed in 20 volumes.

When my kids went to school, I suffered with them every week by studying words with them, very difficult words that were only explained with other difficult words. I often had to use my German dictionary to even understand these words. I learned a lot by helping my kids with these weekly exercises, but many of the words, no matter how hard I tried to show them off, I never used at all in either a conversation or in any text. The book my kids had to learn by heart was called ‘Wordly Wise’. I see that it still exists today, now with also an online version and with books from 1st grade to all the way up to 12th grade.

Since there were so many words that I had never heard before, I was wondering how many of such words are in the Oxford English Dictionary and how many of these words the average person actually uses or even understands. Many words in that dictionary are probably completely outdated and never used today. Does anybody really know?

New words are added every year and words not used anymore are removed from all dictionaries.

When you learn a new language, you never think or consider that a language can change or that words you learn might be replaced with more modern ones. Instead, you keep your dictionary or lesson book close to you and study your vocabulary and practice the correct pronunciation, until you have memorized them all.

The evolving modern technology creates new words constantly. Imagine only 10 years ago, for example, you would not have heard of the word ‘texting’, yet today, we are using it almost on a daily basis. These newly created words are also translated and used in all other countries and if you learn a new language, you will have to continue to study to make sure that you also learn the modern words that are added to the dictionary.

The statistics in this post were taken from this article:
http://www.sharonherald.com/community/they-re-in-oxford-dictionary-but-many-words-have-limited/article_972d5919-04ba-5ce1-9ce7-35ad055573a2.html