American English Discussion -- Page 4

80 percent of words Used The fact that one needs to know fewer than 3,000 words in order to understand 80 percent of a reasonably representative modern English text does not mean that this kind of vocabulary could guarantee any of us complete cultural survival in a modern society. You need to realize that many of the most frequently occurring words in English are function words: articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verb forms such as those of "be, have," or "do." The article "the" is by far the most frequently used word in English, occurring 69,975 times in the one-million-word database. Nouns constitute 26 percent and verbs 18 percent of the database. The first 32 lemmas in the frequency ranks are function words and pronouns. The first verb "say," is at number 33 and the first noun, "man," is at number 44.

Suffixes Suffixes also can help you know new words. Adding "ing" to many words you already know can create some 5000 new words. The use of the suffix "ion" can create 3300 new words to those you know such as "confusion, correction," and "protection." Thirteen hundred words use the suffix of "est," such as "cleanest, hardest, softest," and "nicest." Thus your vocabulary of 3000 words can take a quantum leap by the use of prefixes and suffixes. We have listed some 90 prefixes and suffixes that are used some 125,000 times in a modern American English dictionary.