kadie@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu (04/23/87)
I think the number of English words is an order of magnitute
greater than 2^14-1 (16383), especially if we count all the
forms of words (word,words,wording,worded) and common proper
names (California, Fred, ...).
Carl Kadie
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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CSNET: kadie@UIUC.CSNET
ARPA: kadie@M.CS.UIUC.EDU (kadie@UIUC.ARPA)pdg@ihdev.UUCP (04/23/87)
In article <161200002@uiucdcsb> kadie@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >I think the number of English words is an order of magnitute >greater than 2^14-1 (16383), especially if we count all the >forms of words (word,words,wording,worded) and common proper >names (California, Fred, ...). The issue is not the number of words, but the number of often used words. My understanding is (although I have no sources to back up this claim - anyone??) that the average person has a vocabulary of aprox 10,000 words. Actually, this would be easy to derive from all of the news articles (a good cross section of (reasonably :-) educated people). I wasn't planning on going through the dictionary AARDVARK=1 etc. Something more like (THE=1, AN=2, A=3, TO=4, etc). -- Paul Guthrie ihnp4!ihdev!pdg This Brain left intentionally blank.