From the Guardian, in a perhaps already suspect article about a dog with a large vocabulary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1236272,00.html
"From the age of two, children start to pick up 10 words a day: a teenager typically knows 60,000 words." * * * * This seemed at bit high, at 60,000 Opening a 1500 page dictionary to a random page, I counted 25 main entries. Of these, I didn't know "feer" (to draw the first furrow in ploughing) "feis" (an ancient Irish assembly) "feldsher" (in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, a partly trained person who practices medicine) "Felibre" (a member of Provencal literary brotherhood) and I was proud to already know "feldgrau" (field-gray, the color of German military uniforms) as well as one naughty word that happened to appear on the same page. Some more random experiments yielded similar results. I don't think many teenagers know that many words Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.plambeck.org