American English Discussion -- Page 3

80 percent of words Used

The fact that one needs to know fewer than 3,000 words in order to understand 80 percent of a reasonably representative modern English text does not mean that this kind of vocabulary could guarantee any of us complete cultural survival in a modern society. You need to realize that many of the most frequently occurring words in English are function words: articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verb forms such as those of "be, have," or "do." The article "the" is by far the most frequently used word in English, occurring 69,975 times in the one-million-word database. Nouns constitute 26 percent and verbs 18 percent of the database. The first 32 lemmas in the frequency ranks are function words and pronouns. The first verb "say," is at number 33 and the first noun, "man," is at number 44.

Possible Words

However knowing these first 3000 words does allow us to correctly guess additional words that do not occur in the 3000-word list. Adult English speakers know that trip is an English word. They also know that "tlip" is not an English word and they don't need a dictionary to discover that fact. But present them with the word "trin" and although they don't know the word, may need a dictionary to find out if it is a proper word or not. The form "trin" conforms to the general constraints of permissible sequences of English sounds. "Tlin" does not conform to the constraints of permissible sounds.

Prefixes

Once we have mastered the 3000 commonly used words in the English language, we have some additional tools to greatly magnify our vocabulary. Prefixes and suffixes can easily let us enlarge our store of recognizable words. The use of prefixes can add thousands of words to your vocabulary. For example, if you knew the words appoint, associate, and agree, knowing the prefix "dis" means to set or move apart, you have three new words of "disappoint, disassociate," and "disagree." If you know the words "marine" and "normal," knowing the prefix "sub," meaning under or below, you now know two new words "submarine" and "subnormal." There are 1,828 words beginning with the prefix "dis." There are 943 words beginning with the prefix "sub." There are 6,555 words beginning with the prefix "in, im" and "ir," to put in front of words like side and power to create "inside" and "impossible."