[wolfrom]

I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off.

When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I dismiss most options because they're much too obscure.

[dspace]

> I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words.

This is what I was thinking. I scored 34K, and rarely encounter a word that I don't understand in regular speech or reading. I also know several thousand jargon words, none of which were on that test. I know what I need to know. Memorizing another 16K words to reach Shakespeare's magical 50K (and feel good about myself) would be a waste of precious mental resources.

[angus77]

As someone else pointed out here, Shakespeare's vocab was just over 30k (which was the number I was familiar with).