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The researchers found out that native speakers know between 12,000 and 20,000 
words, depending on their level of education. 
 
Goulden, Nation and Read (1990) argue that a native speaker university graduate 
might know about 20,000 word families (not including phrases and expressions). 
 
 
Note: 
It’s not an easy task to say precisely how many words there are in English, but the 
Global Language Monitor estimates there are almost a million. 
 
Dictionaries, such as the Cambridge Dictionary of American English, might include at 
least 40,000 frequently used words and phrases. 
 
 
However, it’s possible to communicate adequately with fewer than 20,000 words. Due 
to the fact that some high-frequency words are repeated many times in both spoken 
and written text, “it is said that learners can understand a large proportion of texts 
with a relatively small vocabulary” (McCarten, 2007, p. 1). 
 
McCarten suggests that foreign students who know, for example, the most frequent 
2,000 words should be able to understand about 80% of the words in a text. If they 
learn the most frequent 5,000 words their level of understanding might rise to 88.7%. 
 
She also states that when it comes to spoken language, it’s even better because 1,800 
words make up over 80% of the spoken corpus (McCarten, 2004; O’Keeffe, McCarten, 
and Carter, 2007). 
 
 
 
 
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In practical terms, the good news for foreign language learners is that learning 5,000 
words might not be the easiest task in the world; however, it’s definitely an easier 
goal to achieve than learning 20,000 words. Also, learning the most 2,000 frequent 
words is even easier. 
 
That leads us to the issue of frequency of words.