i6o 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



as accurately as possible, giving all meanings where there are more 

 than one, depth and accuracy as well as breadth of knowledge may be 

 tested. In college classes where twenty of the hundred words were 

 defined, 114 out of 246 students were found to have denned the same 

 proportion of words that they marked as known and only seventeen 

 showed a difference of as much as three words of the twenty from the 

 corresponding proportion of the hundred words marked. The over- 

 estimations slightly exceeded the under estimations. 



The author is convinced that one hundred words selected 

 as has been described and marked with care gives sufficient 

 basis for an approximate estimate of the size of the understanding 

 vocabulary of college and high-school students, and of the higher 

 grades of the grammar school. In the author's own classes where 

 students were ranged in three grades according to the number of words 

 marked as known in one list of words, other lists of words similarly 

 selected resulted in 60 per cent, to 80 per cent, of them being again 

 in the same grade, while none were changed from the lowest to the 

 highest grade. 



Using Webster's Academic Dictionary as a basis it appears from 

 averaging about two thousand papers that the size of vocabularies are 

 likely to approximate the following: 



Grade II 4,480 



Grade IV 7,020 



Grade VI 8,700 



Grade VIII 12,000 



High School. 



Freshmen 15,640 



Junior 17,600 



Grade III 6,620 



Grade V 7,860 



Grade VII 10,660 



Grade IX 13,400 



Sophomore 16,020 



Senior 18,720 



The average for normal school students is 19,000 and for college 

 students 20,120. The colleges represented in this test were Bryn Mawr, 

 Smith, Columbia, Brown University and Pratt Institute, while the 

 grades and high schools were mostly in Massachusetts cities. 



There seems to be no constant difference between the sexes. On 

 only a part of the papers was age given, but there is reason to believe 

 that vocabularies increase up to thirty. In Pratt Institute where 

 students varied greatly in age, those above twenty-five knew from five 

 to ten per cent, more words than those in the same classes who were 

 below twenty years of age. It is not likely that the growth of vocabu- 

 lary is great after thirty, when deeper specialized and executive activi- 

 ties have taken the place of general advancement into new fields of 

 knowledge and many words once known are forgotten. 



One important factor in the growth of vocabularies was investigated 

 by accompanying the list of words with a request to write names of 



