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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...

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