It was inescapable when I was growing up in North America, though with
education I came to view it as hopelessly lower-middlebrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest

Crystal focuses on a regular feature called "It pays to increase your
word power", which first appeared in 1945, written by "dictionary editor
and lexical enthusiast" Wilfred J.Funk. (His son Peter took over after
his death, and replaced "increase" with "enrich" in the title.)

This leads on to the matter of vocabulary size. Crystal cites some figures:

-150,000 entries in "medium-sized [English] dictionary"
-50,000 words in passive vocabulary of most people (i.e. most people who
take the trouble to estimate it, by means of dictionary sampling)
-up to 100,000 for "well-read" people

Active vocabulary? Much harder to estimate.
"Samples suggest that our active vocabulary is likely to be about a
third of our passive."
That's a figure I hadn't heard before.

Ar an cúigiú lá de mí Feabhra, scríobh Ross Clark:

> It was inescapable when I was growing up in North America, though with
> education I came to view it as hopelessly lower-middlebrow.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest
>
> Crystal focuses on a regular feature called "It pays to increase your word
> power", which first appeared in 1945, written by "dictionary editor and
> lexical enthusiast" Wilfred J.Funk. (His son Peter took over after his
> death, and replaced "increase" with "enrich" in the title.)
>
> This leads on to the matter of vocabulary size. Crystal cites some figures:
>
> -150,000 entries in "medium-sized [English] dictionary"
> -50,000 words in passive vocabulary of most people (i.e. most people who take
> the trouble to estimate it, by means of dictionary sampling)
> -up to 100,000 for "well-read" people

As an undergraduate I irritated one of my lecturers by coming up with the
figure of 40,000 words as a normal vocabulary (based on the size of a normal
learner’s bilingual dictionary, probably Hachette). He felt it was closer to
16,000. Nice to see support for my position!

> Active vocabulary? Much harder to estimate.
> "Samples suggest that our active vocabulary is likely to be about a third of
> our passive."
> That's a figure I hadn't heard before.

And passive can become active easily enough, I’m sure we’ve all used a word we
normally wouldn’t after our interlocutor did within the same conversation.

It wasn’t a bad idea for a recurrent piece, vocabulary size correlates at 0.8
with general intelligence (the g of IQ tests), I’m sure many decision-makers
even then noticed this in hiring and promoting people.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)