What is the estimated number of words in poet John Keats vocabulary?
The way that a poet’s “vocabulary” is measured is usually through a concordance, an alphabetical list of words in a particular work that shows every occurrence of that word. Therefore, the complete concordance of a poet’s works would show all of the words used as well as how often. It is probably the overall number of words that your teacher was referring to. Linguist Richard Lederer (in “A Man of My Words”) estimates that an average English speaker has a vocabulary of between 10000-20000 words. But only 767 of those words make up 96% of their actual conversation. Other estimates put the number of words regularly used around 2000 or so. In contrast, a concordance of Keats’s work shows almost 9000 unique words (e.g., http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/keats/). Of course, this may not be the best way to compare vocabularies, since a poet is more likely to call upon their vocabulary more br
