[sukh]

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

[p1esk]

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

[rjsw]

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.

[jnicholasp]

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.

[zeristor]

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

[p1esk]

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...

[ap22213]

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?

[roel_v]

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)

[cheriot]

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.

[dempseye]

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.

[woliveirajr]

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