A little help, please

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>I need the number of words in the vocabulary of the average, moderately
>literate American, broken down into spoken, written (if significantly
>different from spoken), and reading.

Of course it's difficult to quantify and difficult to measure. Using
dictionary headwords for counting, Crystal reports active lexica of about
30,000-60,000 words, passive about 40,000-75,000: p. 123 in the "Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language" (1995).

[Sorry about the source: we blue-collar types have limited lexica (our
word-lists, like our words, are "nasty, brutish, and short") and we like
books with lots of colored pictures. (^_^)]

-- Doug Wilson