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Thursday, October 30, 2008
SRI LANKA LYCEUM: Vocabulary 1
How many words in Shakespeare?
'Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words' (from the BBC television series, the Story of English, 1986). This is a commonly quoted figure, deriving from Marvin Spevack's multi-volume Complete & Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (1968-80), which lists 29,066 different words & 884,647 words in all.
However before we can interpret such figures, we need to ask what is meant by 'different words'. The Concordance counts different text types-for example, all instances of goes would be counted together, as would all instances of going, & all instance of gone. But to count these as three different words is of limited value when talking about vocabulary size in a literary context, where we are trying to develop a sense of an author's expressive breadth. An approach which counts lexemes captures this insight more efficiently: all instances of goes, going, & gone would then be placed under the single heading, GO. But when this is done, the size of Shakespeare's lexicon takes a sudden & dramatic fall to less than 20,000.
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