Duke
08-28-2004, 09:40 AM
Does everyone remember the old "What would be a good example of a word that half the population knows?" thread? Anyhow, I was thinking about that a little and came up with another question that I think is interesting.
Say 2 people have pretty good vocabularies. Maybe 150,000 words each. Not a SOWPODS Scrabble expert who has 400k words or whatever in their head (plus a separate vocabulary for their native language if you're talking about a guy like Pakorn), but a pretty decently large vocabulary. Certainly some of the words would be specific to whatever they do with their life, and therefore they wouldn't share those words in common.
Anyhow, my question is: What percentage of the words that someone knows would, on average, be distinct from words that someone who has an equally large vocabulary knows?
Words that come to mind for various reasons (either I learned them for a weird reason or I saw it and thought: "gee, I bet 99% of the people reading this wouldn't know this word"):
abecederian
quincunx
hoopoe
toquet
They're weird words, which is part of the point. How many of these sort of "odd" words would each posess? How many would seem perfectly normal to one person but not to another - assuming the same total vocabulary? What would the most normal word be that one of the people had never heard?
I think that's a more interesting question than what a 50% word would be, since that's just a self-selecting subgroup made up of people with above average vocabularies arguing over how ignorant they think the average person is. The logical conclusion in that would be to construct a test and vote on who the most average person we all know is, and have them take it. I think that generating our own Salieri would be kinda cruel.
~D
Say 2 people have pretty good vocabularies. Maybe 150,000 words each. Not a SOWPODS Scrabble expert who has 400k words or whatever in their head (plus a separate vocabulary for their native language if you're talking about a guy like Pakorn), but a pretty decently large vocabulary. Certainly some of the words would be specific to whatever they do with their life, and therefore they wouldn't share those words in common.
Anyhow, my question is: What percentage of the words that someone knows would, on average, be distinct from words that someone who has an equally large vocabulary knows?
Words that come to mind for various reasons (either I learned them for a weird reason or I saw it and thought: "gee, I bet 99% of the people reading this wouldn't know this word"):
abecederian
quincunx
hoopoe
toquet
They're weird words, which is part of the point. How many of these sort of "odd" words would each posess? How many would seem perfectly normal to one person but not to another - assuming the same total vocabulary? What would the most normal word be that one of the people had never heard?
I think that's a more interesting question than what a 50% word would be, since that's just a self-selecting subgroup made up of people with above average vocabularies arguing over how ignorant they think the average person is. The logical conclusion in that would be to construct a test and vote on who the most average person we all know is, and have them take it. I think that generating our own Salieri would be kinda cruel.
~D