346 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



contains 317,000 words. How many of these are obsolete or obsoles- 

 cent can not be determined because it is impossible to draw a hard 

 and fast line. Every successive work of this kind is larger than its 

 predecessor, and the growth is very rapid. This is true not only of 

 English, but of every living tongue, since all are in the process of accre- 

 tion. And yet no English dictionary claims to include all the vocables 

 that belong to the language, or at least are English. For the outlaws 

 we have special vocabularies of localisms, dialect and vulgar terms, and 

 so forth, which by themselves fill a number of large volumes. 



We have an illuminating demonstration of the process by which 

 word-lists grow in the case of certain compounds. In the eleventh 

 English and the first American edition of Johnson the number of com- 

 pounds with the prefix poly- is twenty-six; in the Century there are 

 more than 550. Johnson gives no compounds with psycho-; the Cen- 

 tury furnishes several columns. Lexicographers who aim at complete- 

 ness can not exclude such compounds, yet many of them can not be 

 classed as strictly a part of our language. With only a slight variation 

 they may be found in the lexicons of every civilized tongue. They 

 form a sort of international code. They are easily understood by every 

 one who knows a little Greek and Latin, the former furnishing by far 

 the largest contingent. 



In this connection we are almost involuntarily led to ask the ques- 

 tion, How many words does an ordinary man use? How many can he 

 comprehend which he would not venture to use? How many words is 

 the strongest memory capable of retaining? To the first question we 

 have on record several answers. The late Max Miiller in one of his 

 lectures reports the testimony of an English clergyman to the effect 

 that some of the agricultural laborers of his parish employed less than 

 a thousand. A recent authority on the Gipsies declares that some of 

 these people living in the villages of Sivas, in Asia Minor, although 

 speaking a language that is clearly related to the Indie branch of the 

 Aryan, do not have in their entire vocabulary more than six hundred 

 words. Testimony of this kind should be received with distrust, al- 

 though its falsity can not be proved. Some of the statements about 

 the vocabulary of children before the age of five have been shown to be 

 far too low. A person of fair natural ability, but of limited education, 

 can comprehend a long list of vocables which he would not venture to 

 use. There is no doubt that the popular audiences to whom Cicero 

 addressed his Catilinarian orations followed him understandingly and 

 with a fair degree of appreciation, although they were utter strangers 

 to the beauty of his diction. Most persons understand preaching and 

 popular lectures, even when the exact signification of many of the 

 terms used by the speaker is not clear. The general run of the dis- 

 course has always a great deal of influence on the meaning of the 

 separate words used by the speaker or writer. 



