Lexitronics

Debate concerning the number of words in the English language continues to fascinate, and calculating the exact number is no easy matter. What actually counts as a word has to be established, and then there are small matters such as dialect words, borrowings, jargon, coinages and other issues to contemplate. Should you attempt this calculation, you have guaranteed failure to look forward to, not least because whilst making your calculation, other words will have entered the language. Nonetheless, a million words would probably not be an unreasonable estimate. An impressive number, unless you are unfortunate enough, that is, to be a learner of English as a second or foreign language.

The news however is not all bad. It is many years now since research commenced into discovering which words are used most frequently and for what purposes, and it is now fairly much accepted that two to three thousand common word families will probably make up between 85% and 95% of any given text. What is more, with today’s computer software, we can put this to the test. For instance, it has just taken me little more than a couple of minutes on Tom Cobb’s excellent Compleat Lexical Tutor Site (http://lextutor.ca/vp/bnl) to establish that 95% of the words used in this review actually belong to a limited and defined set of around 2709 common word families.

It is pleasant also to note that this 2709 list results from research in our own part of the world by Ali Billuroglu, an instructor at the Eastern Mediterranean University, and Steve Neufeld at the Middle East Technical University, North Cyprus. What is more, the outcome is now available in the form of a very practical and compact book. BNL 2709 is published by RUSTEM Kitabevi together with a companion CD and includes five staged sets of worksheets, with a variety of tasks to help students learn the common meanings, collocations and uses of these essential words. You can get details about pricing and ordering from http://thebnl.org.