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Comment by sukh | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for writing about this.

Unfortunately, study [1] shows that children who grow up in less wealthy households, know 18000 fewer words by the time they are 5 than a child that grows up in a wealthy family leaving a very clear disadvantage early on.

[1] The Beginning of Life

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Did you mean 1800 words? Most people will not learn 18000 distinct words during their lifetime.

There was a link posted here a while ago to a website that estimated the size of your vocabulary, plenty of HN posters were over 40000.

I'd be interested in that link if you can recall it.

I would guess, though, that the website was counting different forms of the 'same' word as distinct words - e.g., jump, jumped, jumping is three words rather than one word with several tenses. Obviously counting this way will multiply the same person's vocabulary several times vs the alternate way.

I don't know if this is that link, but it fits the bill:

http://testyourvocab.com/

It gave me 36,800

I'm encouraged that there are more words for me to learn

To illuminate these numbers, the vocabularies of famous English writers range from 15,000 to 30,000 unique words [1].

[1] https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/shakespeare_un...

That's interesting. Why would they learn fewer words? Do the less wealthy just talk less? Or, do they learn other words that are then culled from their vocabulary?

I can't find the source, but I've read that it's related to how much time a parent spends speaking and reading to their child.

There is no way to say this without sounding like an asshole, so I'll just forego trying to sugarcoat it: I can read perezhilton.com without ever having to look up a word. Reading the Economist, I have to look up at least one word every week. Growing up, I never knew a single person reading the Economist or the equivalent; while reading the spatial-and-temporal equivalent of perezhilton.com was though of (by my larger environment, not my nuclear family luckily) as something that was almost intellectual, because hey, it was reading.

(I'm a non-native English speaking currently middle class European from a semi-rural area and from a working class background)

Surely you mean 1800, not 18000. Learning 18000 less would give them a negative vocabulary, as the normal vocabulary size for a 5-year-old is much less than that.

Please could you provide more details, or a link, to the [1] reference you made?

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