We take our mother tongue for granted, a language we learn as young children without realizing the effort involved. It is only when as adults we try to pick up another language that we fully understand how much hard work surrounds each acquired word.

Depending on who you listen to, estimates vary as to the size of a typical native English speaker’s vocabulary. The ballpark figures seem to put most adults under 20 thousand words, while graduates achieve somewhere around 23 thousand words. It’s a subject [Alex Eames] became interested in after reading a BBC article on it, and he decided to write his own software to produce a personal estimate.

His Python script takes the Scrabble word list, and presents the user with a list of words, for each one of which they have to indicate their comprehension. After a hundred words have been presented it calculates an estimate of the size of the user’s vocabulary. [Alex] wrote it on and for the Raspberry Pi, but it should work quite happily on any platform with Python 3. It certainly had no problem with our Ubuntu-based PC.

There is plenty of opportunity for bragging over the size of one’s vocabulary with a script like this one, but it’s something of a statistical leveler in that if you are truthful in your responses it will almost certainly put you exactly where you might expect for your age or level of education. If you want to know the result this script returned for a Hackaday scribe, for example, the answer is 23554.

This subject is a slight departure into software from our usual hardware subject matter, but it’s one of those tests that becomes rather a consuming interest when performed competitively among a group of friends. How well will you fare?

Via [Recantha]