iv . APPENDIX. 



Assistant Librarian in the Patent Office, to count the number of 

 words which he would use on 8 of the pages previously counted by 

 me. He has done so, and on pp. 550 to 554 in H, where I find 100 

 he has marked 142 ; and on pp. 380 to 384, where I find 115, he 

 finds 131. This counting and selection was done in the most de- 

 liberate and critical way, and the excess of his numbers over mine 

 shows not only that his vocabulary is larger than mine, but it 

 further shows that my estimate was fairly made ; and this is a 

 point I am very glad to have so clearly established. 



I have a letter from the eminent Prof. Whitney, of Yale Col- 

 lege, on this subject, portions of which I quote : " I do not see 

 that your method is not one which should yield a tolerably accu- 

 rate result, nor am I disposed seriously to question the accuracy 

 of the result you have reached." Prof. Whitney refers to Marsh, 

 Lectures on the English Language, p. 181-2, who says that one 

 person may be able to wield 50,000 of the 100,000 English words, 

 but that "few writers or speakers use as many as 10,000 ; ordi- 

 nary persons of fair intelligence not above 3000 or 4000." 



Since the receipt of Prof. Whitney's note I have determined 

 from Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke's " Complete Concordance to 

 Shakspere" the number of words in his vocabulary. Here, 

 however, we have incomplete data, as " all nouns and verbs 

 spelled alike are placed under the same heading." 



I find in — 

 A pp. 2 and 3 86 words. F pp. 258 and 259 2t words. 

 B " 38 " 39 81 " G " 296 " 297 25 " 



C " 136 " 137 83 " H " 338 " 339 11 " 



D " 178 " 179 51 " I " 386 " 387 134 " 

 E " 218 " 219 68 " J " 398 " 399 57 " 

 Counting also the words on the 35 pages, 1, 25, 50, 75, 100, 



125, 825, 850, I find 926 words. 



Therefore 55 pages have 1555 words, or 1 page has 28.3 words. 

 There are 859.5 pages of such words, and hence Shakspere's 

 vocabulary (with the important omission of all verbs which are 

 spelled like nouns) contained over 24,000 words. 



A complete " Concordance to the Poems of Milton" has been 

 published by Mr. Charles Dexter Cleveland, and I find that on 

 5 pages of this work there are 562 words, or 112.4 words to a 

 page. The number of words to each page is quite uniform, so 

 that five pages give a sufficiently accurate determination. The 

 results from each page below will show this. 



562 " oraveragenumberofwordstoapagell2.4. 

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