Better them Shakespeare?

In 37 plays, Shakespeare used some 15,000 different words (not counting derivatives). Everyone knows that being able to recognize a word is not the same as feeling sufficiently familiar with it to use it. Nonetheless, last week a Northwestern University psychologist reported, for what it was worth, a surprising finding: an average college-educated modern man has at least a nodding acquaintance with four times as many words as Shakespeare used.

Northwestern's famed Psychologist Robert H. Seashore and Miss Lois D. Eckerson had worked seven years devising and polishing a vocabulary test. They took a scientific sample, 1,.320 words from the 450,000 Funk & Wagnalls' unabridged dictionary. Their test: to choose from several given possibilities the right definition for each word. They gave their test to more than 500 college students.

Findings: > An average student recognized* (or correctly guessed) about 60,000 common words, 1,500 rare words, 95,000 derivatives, compounds, etc. Total average vocabulary: 156,000 of Funk & Wagnalls' 450,000 words.

> Biggest individual vocabulary found: 192,500 words.

Professor Seashore's sop to Bardolaters: "It should be remembered that older writers had a much smaller English language to draw from, and that we know nothing about the number of additional words which they could have used if necessary."

* Investigation showed that "if a person can recognize a word at all, there is a good chance that he can also use it [correctly]."

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