by Michael Nordine (interestingfacts.com)
Original photo by loops7/ iStock
The English language is vast — so vast, in fact, that the average native speaker only knows about 6% of all English words, which equates to roughly 35,000 of the 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. That percentage may seem small, but the fact that most of us get by just fine on a daily basis suggests the other 94% of words are fairly obscure or redundant. English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language due to its history of freely incorporating words from other languages, particularly French (the origin of at least 30% of English words). Most adults learn an average of one new word per day until middle age, when vocabulary growth tends to slow or even stop — all the more reason to keep the mind sharp with crossword puzzles and word games.