Education: Words

Inexact vocabularians have reckoned the average intelligent adult's vocabulary at about 15,000 words. Recently, however, Northwestern University's Psychology Professor Robert Holmes Seashore* devised a scientific test to determine the total number of English words a person would recognize. It is a multiple-choice examination using sample lists of "basic" and "derived" words from Funk & Wagnails' unabridged dictionary, which lists 450,000 words in all. Dr. Seashore's test includes common words as well as puzzlers like antisialogogue (an agent preventing the flow of saliva). Last week he reported the surprising discovery that the average college student has a recognition vocabulary of 176,000 words—62,000 "basic" and 114,000 "derived."

An individual has 1) a "recognition," 2) a "possible" use (8% smaller than "recognition") and 3) an "actual" use vocabulary. No accurate tests have been made of the "actual use" vocabulary, but a professional writer who went through Dr. Seashore's test marking words he had used in, speech and writing claimed a working vocabulary of 40,000 basic and 40,000 derived words, a "possible use" vocabulary of 225,000.

Boners. Other word news of the week: New York City's Board of Examiners exhibited a list of boners by college-graduated candidates who were asked to illustrate the meaning of certain words in examinations for teaching licenses:

¶"How venial, how delectable is the grape!"

¶"Indigent matter cannot be eaten without serious consequences."

¶"A martinet sat on the highest branch of the tree."

¶"She was freed by the gangster because she was a captious blond."

¶"The dead man had wished to be cremated, and the increment scattered to the winds."

¶"The perfunctory organs are a great help to man."

¶"Don't be so redolent, say it."

¶"Having laid the oranges in a row, he proceeded to excoriate their skins one by one."

Builder. Psychologist Johnson O'Connor, who started with astronomical and mathematical research and was a metallurgist before he became interested in industrial personnel problems, is director of the "Human Engineering Laboratory" in Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken. N. J. From testing 20,000 students, businessmen, professional workers, people in all walks of life, he has concluded that "an extensive knowledge of the exact meanings of English words accompanies outstanding success in this country more often than any other single characteristic which the Human Engineering Laboratory has been able to isolate and measure." His laboratory has just published the Johnson O'Connor English Vocabulary Builder.