A speaker at a recent school board meeting claimed the vocabulary of the average American grade school student was 25,000 words in 1945 and about 10,000 today. This is pretty disturbing if true. What do you think? —Dave Evans, Bellingham, Washington
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Soon I found much the same information in a contemporaneous New York Times item. On examining the original research, however, it became clear someone had misconstrued it. Rinsland’s 1945 study tabulated words used by kids in grades one through eight. But the number Harper’s called an “average” was actually a total. Reviewing 100,000 student compositions containing six million words altogether, Rinsland recorded 25,632 distinct word forms.
The 1984 monograph by Ingersoll and Carl Smith was similar, but its sample was much smaller: 5,000 students, half a million words. With a corpus only a 12th as large, of course, you’d expect a far lower count of distinct forms. Using rough estimates derived from the American Heritage Word Frequency Book, a 500,000-word sample should have around 60 percent fewer unique words than a six-million-word sample independent of the writers’ vocabulary. As it happens, Ingersoll and Smith reported 10,265 forms—just about 60 percent fewer.
Researchers arguing for a cohort effect don’t automatically conclude worsening education is to blame. People who frequent school board meetings, showing less restraint, generally assume schools have gone to hell since that 1945 cohort passed through. Though belief in a bygone golden age of education is widespread, there’s little to support it: federal reading-assessment scores have held steady since the first test in 1969; an Indiana study from 1976 showed virtually no change in reading skills since 1945. (Not that this is anything for schools to crow about.)
