If you love words, you may be like me and particularly relish uncommon old words. Words that have fallen out of use, that sound extravagant and fanciful to the contemporary ear; words the dictionary still includes but describes as 'obsolete'.
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| All Grandiloquent images from Grandiloquent Word of the Day |
Ott's artwork, his Victorian-era characters, and funny quotes make the words come alive again for a minute. But the words are really not alive, they are obsolete. If they are not used, they are dead.
Were they grieved on their way to obsolescence? Did someone, at some time, say to themselves (or their barber), "Oh, why don't we hear the word 'palpebrous' anymore? It's such a handy word, so why has it fallen out of use?" I know I just did (to self, not barber).
Well, yes, they are obsolete, I rarely know any of the Grandiloquent words. But who decided they were no longer useful? How did they fall out of use? Were they perhaps pushed?
Obsolescence for the once useful
At some point, humans created those words now deemed obsolete, and at another point they stopped being useful or at least stopped being used.
We accept and celebrate that new words are created all the time and that word meanings shift, broaden and narrow (see the post on the coronavirus) as natural features of dynamic language use.
How many words are in English?
Words are the traces of our dynamic use of language - which changes constantly. So, the number of words is impossible to put an absolute figure on.
To start, it's not straightforward to determine what is to be called a word. Is dog one word or three - given it has three very different meanings (the noun form meaning an animal, and verb form meaning to follow persistently, and a third noun form slang meaning as an insult as well)? Do combinations of words, like bone-weary, mean we should count it in addition to its two component words. How do we count words like quick and quickly - two words or one word with various forms? Then we need to decide whether to count slang words (like whacha?) or acronyms so common they are now treated like words (like LOL - 'I LOLed in my car'). What about all the words that English has borrowed from other languages, like cannoli, nachos and nori. Should medical and scientific terms, like eolian², be counted as words when they are used by only a few thousand people?
Because the boundary of a language is not fixed or static, to produce a dictionary, the collators have to set those boundaries somewhere - an arbitrary line.
Two books highlight how different perspectives and different decisions about those boundaries - what is or is not included - lead to different listings and different outcomes. The Surgeon of Crowthorne is a non-fiction book on the making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1884 to 1928, written from the perspective of one of the main contributors William Chester Minor. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a fictional telling of the same story through the eyes of the fictional Esme, daughter of one of the men working on it.
Both books highlight the many personal and moral judgements involved, and the decision-making dilemmas that confront those who compile dictionaries. Words are personal and contextual.
So, dictionaries can only be a guide to the number of words in a language. The second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) contains 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words. Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes 470,000 words.
It's clear that these two dictionary compilation projects have made very different decisions about the language boundary dilemmas.
So, we can't answer the question absolutely. And if we were able to all agree to some rules about what is in and what is out, and come up with a number of words, it would be wrong by next week, as new words are created, as word meanings shift and mutate, as slang words move into common use, and as some words just stop being used.
The words called 'obsolete'.
Why do some words stop being used?
The words now described as obsolete were created at some time by humans who found them useful.
For some reason they stopped being used. But did they stop being useful?
I imagine that a few things determine which words end up like cockroaches - lasting unchanged over centuries, and which are like dodos - quaint and almost forgotten. It could involve the social context (e.g. those who use the word being excluded), or the political, class or racist loading of a word which then renders it 'tainted', or some other social factor we have no record of.
All of these forces probably come into play, but I'm wondering if there is a simpler explanation. Do some words become obsolete simply because there is a limit to how many we can know? A sort of mental load-bearing limit for words?
We are constantly creating new words and shaping and shifting existing words into yet more words/meanings. To accommodate this, do some words just have to drop off out of our vocabulary?
How many words can one person know?
Adults learn about one new word a day until middle age, and then our vocabulary stops growing.
According to Preply, most adult native English speakers have around 20,000–35,000 words in their vocabulary.⁴ (Their testing method doesn't tap into the difference between understanding and using a word, but I was satisfied with it when I scored near the top of 'most native English speakers', lol.😀)
Interestingly, Preply report that finding a testing sample of 45,000 recognisable words was a challenge because of the vast number of scientific/technical words, words not applicable to practical vocabulary use, or those that are obsolete. Recall that of the 218,632 words in the The Oxford Dictionary, only 171,476 words are described as 'in current use'. If Preply think selecting 45,000 recognisable words is stretch, this means that around 126,476 words in the dictionary are not used by or useful to most of us.
Even Preply's test sample of 45,000 words 'common enough to be included' in a vocabulary test includes a lot that you and I might never use (or even read), like legerdemain, terpsichorean or opsimath.
If you consider 'core' vocabulary - words we use for everyday communication - Lingholic suggests that if you know 1.75% of the English dictionary, you will understand 95% of what you read. That's roughly 4000 words.
In summary, the dictionary contains many more words that we don't use than those we do.
The two meanings of obsolete: no longer used OR no longer useful don't necessarily align. There are many words described as 'in current use' that we don't use. And while we no longer use them, many of the Oxford's 47,156 so-called obsolete words could be very useful indeed.
No longer in use but potentially very useful
Talking of potentially useful, I needed both scurryfunge and fudgel just this week. After several days of choosing to fudgel, I was forced to scurryfunge before my guests arrived for the election party.
Cacoethes is absolutely useful. It would be the perfect word for a caring person to be able to ask a despairing friend, 'I know you feel bad about the state of Australian politics at the moment, but are you thinking of doing something cacoethetic?'
And I can't understand why bloviate is an obsolete word. We have just spent six weeks listening to political blither being pushed by marketing men masquerading as politicians, too busy bloviating to do anything of value for the people of Australia. I've heard more bloviating in the last week than a person should have to bear.
So, all these words seem extremely useful, capturing precise meanings that would help in specific social situations, but for some reason, they are not in use. I wonder, if I started using them would they become 'solete' words again?⁵
At least, for now, I can hold them close and murmur, 'You're not at all obsolete to me'.
A persiflagenous post instead
Footnotes
- As usual, I can only comment on English.
- Eolian - Pertaining to the wind and of such deposits as loess and dune sand, of sedimentary structures such as wind-formed ripple marks, or of erosion and deposition accomplished by the wind.
- Shipley KG, McAfee JG. (2015). Assessment in speech-language pathology: A resource manual. 5th. Boston: Cengage Learning.
- I found other tests with higher numbers, one reporting the average 60-year-old native English speaking American knows 48,000 words, but this test is no longer available. I imagine the much higher number relates to different ways they resolved the dilemmas about what actually constitutes a word.
- Etymologically, obsolete is probably from ob (meaning 'away') + a form of solere (meaning 'to be used to, be accustomed').
Images
- All Grandiloquent Word of the Day images from https://www.grandiloquentwordoftheday.com/
- The Lords Prayer snipped from social media from The Language Nerds
- Dictionaries galore by البصراوي at https://www.flickr.com/photos/basrawii/4338632236/ [CC BY-SA]
- Vocabulary development chart at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Chart_updated.jpg [Public domain]
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