At Under the News, I learned, in one post, two things. One is amazing, one sad. The amazing thing is that the English language now boasts more than one billion available words, a number that defies my limited imagination. The sad thing is that the average American uses only 14,000. When I was a kid, not too, too long ago, we were taught that the average American showed a sad decline in intellect by using only about 25,000-30,000 words. This was compared to the 40,000 words, or so, that the "average" American apparently could call upon immediately after WWII. Anyway, for more details and a cool link, go here.
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Bookworm Room (ARCHIVES) 
I’ve tried to practice using new and different words on the internet, through debate forums, but everyone started complaining and attacking me for writing posts that they didn’t understand cause they didn’t get the vocabulary or that it was too long or too short or whatever. So I guess making me feel stupid was their way of spreading the misery.
Although one year of doing that, really helped cement vocabulary skills. I picked most of my vocabulary when learning English while reading, books, adult or teenager classed. It also engages more brain cells when you make yourself use different and rare words. It’s a weird feeling, like your brain is expanding or your biceps are contracting.
Reading helps a lot with vocabulary and comprehension. Although it doesn’t really help you to use big words in a creative fashion. Practice makes perfect, and when the penalties for practicing your vocabulary is a bunch of scorn and attacks and unappreciated whining, then I can contemplate why Americans only use a few thousand or so words.
Besides, it’s hard to generate higher vocabulary based diversity among your writings, it is rather similar to a greatly extenuated 10 by 10 matrix with a requirement that you must solve it in some specific number of seconds. There’s only so much stuff you can cram before you start to slow down, and lose your place.
I had to look up extenuated to make sure that it meant what I thought it meant when I first used it up above, and it’s good to know I spelled it right using phonetics the first time. I was using the connotative definition of “lenghtening” and “extending” in one word to convey the meaning of what happens when you stretch an object in 3d space and make it cover a larger area (10×10) while at the same time thinning it. You can’t thin numbers of course, but I always get a mental picture of that however. So presumably, we use rare words to convey rare ideas, although I really don’t know how many people actually would get it without an explanation. But if an explanation is always required and used, why do we have words that consolidate common meanings into rare ones?
So it is sometimes hard to explain what you meant and how it relates to what the dictionary says. Because I never learned all the words I know by reading a dictionary, but through simple context. And that’s a weird sort of learning, because you never exactly can tell anyone “what” a word means, you just know intuitively when and how to use it by how it was used when you first read it.
I like English’s ability to have very distinct shades of meaning in the many words available. Some will say those words are superfluous, but they really aren’t, it is just that the knowledge it takes to understand them fully, takes a bit of work to get. The French might like their static language and “purity” but I was never interested in perfection and stagnancy.
Rubbish. Please read “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker or any other book written by a linguist and not some self proclaimed guardian of the language. The amount of words an average person knows is fairly constant and certainly does not decline.
Ummmm…
It seems you and the other site were both taken in by a bad headline. From the actual AP article:
Oxford University Press lexicographer Catherine Soanes said the database is not a collection of 1 billion different words, but of sentences and other examples of the usage and spelling.
I’m also willing to bet that the vast majority of the words they track are scientific words – words which literally are the sum of their parts.
On the flip side, dear Bookworm, you and I, and most of your readers, are above average in terms of vocabulary we can call upon.