How many English words do you know?

[M1mohammad]

Hello all,

What should I do if I want to find out how many words of English I know? Any special tests?

Thanks in advance,
Nasr

[Torsten]

Hi Nasr,

It's quite difficult to find out how many words you know because your passive vocabulary is always bigger than your active one. Also, most English words can be both -- noun and verb and they have a lot of different meanings depending on the context they are used in. So the question is why would you want to know many words you know? What does that tell you?

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[NinaZara]

Nasr,

How about ticking the words you know in the dictionary?Might take you 8 years thou(just joking :wink: )

I find this question funny because I never count how many words I know in the English language but Japanese always ask me how many kanjis(chinese characters) I've memorized and I always said...hmm, around 2000 because that was in the syllabus, not something that I counted on my own.

Anyway, good luck Nasr.

But really, why do you want to count them? I don't think that is the suitable way to measure your english language skill.

[Englishuser]

Hi,

Perhaps you could tick the words you know on, say, six pages in a college-level dictionary and then use some kind of formula so as to find out approximately how many words you know. However, as Torsten pointed out, it is difficult to say precisely how vast your vocabulary is since many (if not most) English words can be used in more than one sense.

Englishuser

[Tortoise]

I remember that My teacher used to ask us to write down all the words we knew when we were just new learners of English. I think that is a good assignment. isn't it?