Mind Your Vocabulary

The need for a sound base of vocabulary is too important to be emphsized . It provides one the range ,width and depth in expression. Now the central question what should be the ideal base of vocabulary especially keeping in mind the needs of every day use.There has been a lot of research and studies in this field. Some have put it around one thousand and some have put it a little more.These are all empirical studies. In communicational English in the verbal form that is in Spoken English, it is not the number of words alone which come into play .One has to master idioms and phrases which defy all grammatical rules and are creations of usages peculiar to a particular places or situations. And the need for a solid vocabulary is felt all the more in written English for obvious reasons.

Now coming to the ongoing endeavour to find an appropriate number of words which one can describe as core part,the advent and use of computers have added a scientific base to these efforts to replace the empirical studies undertaken earlier which were mainly based on sheer intuition and experience.The magnitude of the task can be gauged from the fact that there exists a large body of innumberable words used in texts as well as spoken.But the use of computers has come as a boon and with the help of appropriate software one can easily count the number of words used or spoken and arrive at the number of words you need to build your core vocabulary.

A recent sample-based study has come out with an interesting list of top 40 words which were used more 10,000 times topping the count and mainly consists of word belonging to the realm of grammar and have no lexical significance like auxiliary verbs,article,noun,pronoun etc.viz.,the,I,you,and,to,yeah,that,of,in,mm,was,know,er,it's,they,but,is,so,laughs,we,on,have,well,no,do,what,for,like,right,oh,just,he,be,all,think whose uses are mainly functional in nature.That sounds preety interesting,isn't it?