words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Unabridged. Worcester's
Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, now in L, it is said, will contain
240,000 principal and 140,000 compound words, or 380,000 words in all. The
dictionary of the French Academy has 33,000; that of the Royal Spanish
Academy, 50,000; the Dutch dictionary of Van Dale, 86,000; the Italian and
Portuguese, each about 50,000 literary, or 150,000 encyclopedic words. Of
course, words can really be counted hardly more than ideas or impressions, and
compounds, dialects, obsolete terms, localisms, and especially technical terms,
swell the number indefinitely. A competent philologist[2] says, if given large
liberty, he "will undertake to supply 1,000,000 English words for 1,000,000
American dollars." Chamberlain[3] estimates that our language contains more
than two score as many words as all those left us from the Latin. Many savage
languages contain only a very few thousand, and some but a few hundred,
words. Our tongue is essentially Saxon in its vocabulary and its spirit and, from
the time when it was despised and vulgar, has followed an expansion policy,
swallowing with little modification terms not only from classical antiquity, but
from all modern languages—Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian—according to
its needs, its adopted children far outnumbering those of its own blood. It
absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves and beggars;
is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and
actually invents new words with no pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, and
many others.[4]
In this vast field the mind of the child early begins to take flight. Here his soul
finds its native breath and vital air. He may live as a peasant, using, as Max
Müller says many do, but a few hundred words during his lifetime; or he may
need 8,000, like Milton, 15,000, like Shakespeare, 20,000 or 30,000, like
Huxley, who commanded both literary and technical terms; while in
understanding, which far outstrips, use, a philologist may master perhaps
100,000 or 200,000 words. The content of a tongue may contain only folk-lore
and terms for immediate practical life, or this content may be indefinitely
elaborated in a rich literature and science. The former is generally well on in its
development before speech itself becomes an abject of study. Greek literature
was fully grown when the Sophists, and finally Aristotle, developed the
rudiments of grammar, the parts of speech being at first closely related with his
ten metaphysical categories. Our modern tongue had the fortune, unknown to
those of antiquity, when it was crude and despised, to be patronized and
regulated by Latin grammarians, and has had a long experience, both for good
and evil, with their conserving and uniformitizing instincts. It has, too, a long