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Cited by 478

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 44 of the 44 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age

Open access
Brysbaert, Marc, Stevens, Michaël, Mandera, Paweł, Keuleers, Emmanuel·2016·Frontiers in Psychology
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116
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Abstract

Based on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days. The knowledge of the words can be as shallow as knowing that the word exists. In addition, people learn tens of thousands of inflected forms and proper nouns (names), which account for the substantially high numbers of 'words known' mentioned in other publications.

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Metadata

Authors
Brysbaert, M., Stevens, M., Mandera, P., & Keuleers, E.
Venue
Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Published
2016-07-29
Volume
7
Pages
1116-1116
ISSN
1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116
OpenAlex
W2506660467
Cited by
478
References
44
FWCI
93.45
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116
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Brysbaert, M., Stevens, M., Mandera, P., & Keuleers, E. (2016). How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116

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