The English language offers a lot of word choices; 171,476 of them, to be exact, according to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary.
That’s not even counting the 47,156 words now considered “obsolete” and probably only used by very old English professors and the writers of instruction books for building a medieval catapult in your back yard.
About 1,000 new words are added to the count each year — words people create and keep using long enough that they are deemed “official.” (My guess is that at least half of these new words are made up accidentally by semi-literate television sports commentators. The other half are made up by kids and politicians trying to hide what they are saying.)
Out of all these words, the average adult native-English speaker can use between 20,000 and 35,000, according to an article I recently read in The Economist magazine. The article said native speakers know, on average, 5,000 words by the time they reach the age of 4 and make it to 10,000 words by the age of 8. After that, people add a word a day until about the age of 45.
The article doesn’t say what happens after 45, but personal experience makes me wonder whether we start losing a word a day. You know, that whatchamacallit part of your brain gets full and starts killing off words.
Then again, maybe we don’t lose words after 45 but just begin forgetting where we stored the ones we have. I am not referring to any of the various forms of dementia that afflict people in their later years. I am talking about mental filing systems so full of words that our cranial microprocessors don’t have enough processing speed to sort them out quickly.
For some reason unknown to me (or maybe just hiding some place in my mental files) nouns — particularly “proper nouns,” like people’s names — started defying quick recall about the age of 55. My wife had to stand near me at business receptions and whisper my client’s names in my ear.
By the time I turned 60, the “common nouns” — used to name common objects and places — were hanging up somewhere and only surfacing after considerable search. In my mid-60s, verbs and verb phrases — action words used to tell people how the nouns are moving about — began to emerge more slowly. Now, my wife had to take a sentence like “What’s-his-name is whatchamacalling better this whatchamacallit” and interpret “Victor Oladipo is rebounding better this season.”
Now in my 70s, I worry that my adjectives and adverbs will soon get stuck in my brain, keeping me from describing the missing nouns or quantifying the verbs I can’t remember.
I guess I should quit complaining about all this. The lapses are momentary and, when I slow down and take a few seconds for the microprocessor to catch up, the words appear.
I am told I have no signs of actual dementia, but am suffering from age-related CRS — said politely, Can’t Remember Stuff syndrome.
Unfortunately, my wife is only two years my junior and is less and less helpful these days. In fact, she even calls on me to provide words for her. Fortunately, our individual processors rarely get hung up on the same word at the same time.
It’s like whatchamacallit — you know, the guy with the beard and the big ears — said during that television show with the woman in the wig one afternoon from channel whatchamajigger. (Darn. The name is on the tip of my tongue. I will ask my wife and let you know next week.)
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page each Sunday. Contact him at
