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Originally Posted by staceyv
OMG, it's $295 a year for a stupid dictionary. WTF???
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It's a very large, stupid dictionary.
The average Native English Speaker* uses about 5K words on a regular basis.
I respect the OED. It is the motherlode of wordage. It can be considered overkill, however.
I'm reminded of the very thick book described by Mrs. Premise (or perhaps Mrs. Conclusion) about how to put your budgie down called "How to Put Your Budgie Down." The OED would serve admirably as the book with which to hit your budgerigar.
* According to the
first website I found via Google that actually answered that question. This number may be suspect because they are trying to sell a tool that will increase your number of words in regular usage.
The knowledge trove that is
Wikipedia says that most native English speakers have a vocabulary of about 30K words. The disparity in numbers leads me to presume that the folks on the high end had grandparents with subscriptions to The Reader's Digest.