Triple Your Vocabulary

If you’ve got a moment, take the Shakespeare by the Numbers Quiz on About.com. It’s fun.

The $250,000 question asks how many unique words Shakespeare used in his complete works. The answer is about 30,000. The average high school student, it turns out, uses about 10,000.

Lots of readily available written sources use a vocabulary that extends beyond a layman’s knowledge. There are lots of ways to improve your personal lexicon if you work at it a little, and that’s always rewarding for language-lovers. But what if you don’t want to sit down with a workbook or a self-help course?

The best option is probably to read. Yet, I find that when reading I’ll just infer the meaning of a word from its surrounding context or skip over it and move on. The meaning will become clear enough as I go. So I don’t really have to learn the words.

What’s great about Shakespeare is, it’s theater–it’s meant to be spoken aloud. If you read some passages aloud to yourself, you’ll realize quickly that you sound silly and awkward when you don’t know what a word means. You can’t create the proper inflection; the sentence doesn’t make sense without the meaning behind it, especially to the modern ear. So you go look up the word… and it’s so satisfying.

Try reading just one full play aloud to yourself, and really look up the words. I guarantee it’ll add several hundred good words to your vocabulary AND heighten your appreciation for the story you just read.

(I fell in love with Shakespeare after I read Twelfth Night aloud with my little brother and the girl I was dating. It changed the way I heard words forever.)