CURIOUS: Just Did an Informal Check on My Vocabulary
I was thinking recently that I would really like to work on expanding my vocabulary. Which led me to wonder, just how many unique words do I normally use when writing? This was all sparked by my annoyance at only knowing a few acceptable greetings for IM: hello, hi, greetings, are you there, how are you. Today I looked for synonyms to "hello" and the best I could find was "hail". A little archaic, but I used it. However, that is where this curiosity about my vocabulary arose.
What I did was very unscientific and horribly inaccurate but less time consuming than me sitting down and writing every unique word I can think of. I took all of my November LiveJournal entries (Downloaded the CSV version) and ran them through a motley collection of sed, grep, sort uniq commands. Then I manually went through and looked for things that i didn't think of excluding and deleted those. The end result was pretty much in line with a statistic I'd read years ago: 817 unique words. The article I read way back said the average person uses about 800 words.
So now to figure out how to expand my vocabulary... I was thinking of trying to find a dictionary file somewhere and then having a system e-mail a single entry to me each day. It would then be reuired of me to use that word in some way within that 24 hour period and weigh whether or not I feel like it would fit general usage. Sure there will be plenty of unusable words in there, but I think this system should generally work for me. However, I'm wondering if anyone else here has any suggestions. I try to read frequently and there are plenty of words I've read and know the meaning of outside of my ~800, but for some reason I never think of using them. So what are your ideas?
What I did was very unscientific and horribly inaccurate but less time consuming than me sitting down and writing every unique word I can think of. I took all of my November LiveJournal entries (Downloaded the CSV version) and ran them through a motley collection of sed, grep, sort uniq commands. Then I manually went through and looked for things that i didn't think of excluding and deleted those. The end result was pretty much in line with a statistic I'd read years ago: 817 unique words. The article I read way back said the average person uses about 800 words.
So now to figure out how to expand my vocabulary... I was thinking of trying to find a dictionary file somewhere and then having a system e-mail a single entry to me each day. It would then be reuired of me to use that word in some way within that 24 hour period and weigh whether or not I feel like it would fit general usage. Sure there will be plenty of unusable words in there, but I think this system should generally work for me. However, I'm wondering if anyone else here has any suggestions. I try to read frequently and there are plenty of words I've read and know the meaning of outside of my ~800, but for some reason I never think of using them. So what are your ideas?