How big is your vocabulary?

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Whenever I get to a word that I don't understand in a book, I have to look it up. I read at a brisk pace, but certain books, especially ones with antiquated words. can make reading an arduous (but still entertaining) task. I Never use a "big" word when an ordinary one will suffice, that could be considered pretentious, or else it would confuse many. I guess one could get away with more esoteric words in prose than common vernacular, but it would still require knowing one's audience.

PS: Slightly off-topic, I can't stand the phrase "as-it-were". In print it's annoying to me, but in speech it's insufferable. It seems phony faux-intellectual to me. Ditto for the semicolon. Then again, perhaps I use the hyphen and parentheses too often, so who am I to judge.

after counting every word i know, i tabulated that my vocabulary consists of 16,384 words.
but if i had not lost my "users manual", i would have been able to look it up almost immediately.

I used bigger words when I was younger. I was that stereotypical "little professor" some aspies have been tagged with. I grew to learn that the majority of people I met hated or didn't understand it so I quit.

When I write fiction I use a lot of substitutions for the common words "say" and "walk." In essence, no one "said" anything. Instead, they shouted, barked, yelled, screamed, cussed, whispered, uttered, offered, squeezed out, lied, interjected, booed, hissed, supposed, calmly stated, cooed, etc.

Likewise, no one walked. They flew, sauntered, sashayed, limped, sidestepped, backslid, tiptoed, ran, raced, jumped, hopped, casually strode, traipsed, moseyed, danced, leaped, crawled, secreted themselves, jogged, zipped over, scooted, etc from point A to point B.

Whan I was around 15 I got obsessed with the notion of measuring the size people's vocabularies.

Unlike B9 instead of 'counting every word I know' I opted to devise a test. The tester would pick a few random pages out of the unabridged dictionary and then read each word off to the testee. Then the testee would affirm, or deny knowing the meaning of the word. If the tester were dubious about the testee's veracity he could just ask the testee, and the test subject would give a definition. The tester would have the word's definition right there in front of him on the open page of the dictionary hidden from view from the test subject so even if the tester didnt know the word himself he could confirm or deny the testee's claim.

The next step - divide the number of sample pages into the total number of pages in the random house unabridged dictionary.

Final step- take the above resulting number and multiply that by the test subjects's score. The result would be a fairly accurate census of the test subject's total vocabulary.

Lets say there are 2000 pages in the dictionary, and you used a five page sample, and the subject got a score of 20 "I know what that word means's". You would muliply 20 by 400 (5/2000) and get 8000.

For brevity's sake we each just used one page in the dictionary as our sample size.

Dad got the highest total vocabulary (in the 50 thousands I seem to recall), Mom the next, me the next, and little sis the lowest. Even my 10 year old sister got atleast 16000 if memory serves so I think B9 must have undercounted his vocabulary.