I came across this article in my drafts section. Because my struggle with getting the right word for the time continues, I thought you might be interested in the following statistics about the number of English words in existence and the number the average person actually uses.

The same issue of Godey’s that suggested Christmas gifts for 1864 contained a paragraph of information taken from the Literary Gazette claiming that the English language at that time had only 25,000 words. According to several internet sources, the English language currently has over 170,000 in current use, and the average person knows about 40,000 words but uses around 20,000 of them regularly. After my recent suffragist/suffragette experience, I have become hyperaware of when words came into existence, and from the above statistics, I have reason for my concern.

In the same paragraph stating the number of words in the English language in 1864 (I am supposing someone arrived at that statistic by counting the words in a dictionary ), additional word counts were given for specific works. According to the Literary Gazette, the Old Testament has 5,643 different words, Milton’s Paradise Lost has 8,000 different words, and all of Shakespeare’s plays and poems together, have 15,000 different words. What I wanted to know as I read the above is who in the age before computers made the count and why. Unfortunately, the brief paragraph did not disclose that information.