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12/21/2006: "Please read..."

Our very own English language has one of the largest vocabulary sets of all the languages in the world, containing somewhere around 600,000 to 1,000,000 words. By the late teen years, speakers of English can claim an average vocabulary of approximately 50,000-60,000 words. In 1945, the average American student between the ages of 6 and 14 had a written vocabulary of about 25,000 words. Today, with the advent of television and the Internet, that written vocabulary has dropped to about 10,000 words. It is estimated that students must learn more than 88,000 words by 9th grade to read the textbooks that they are now asked to read.