Also, after hardly budging in the first half of the 20th century, the English vocabulary expanded at a rate of 8, 500 words a year in the second half, leading to a 70% increase in its size since 1950 (see chart).
In the Victorian age, it took a small army of volunteer readers twenty years to amass the 3.5 million citation slips illustrating the usage of all the words in the English vocabulary that were used to prepare the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
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Though most of us feel dis-eased around disease, colloquial English proffers a sparse vocabulary for the expression of embarrassment, fear, anxiety, grief or sorrow.
The result is that French and English have a greater overlap of shared vocabulary than French and Italian (or, for that matter, English and Italian).
But this is also a remarkably sharp-eared guide to the vocabulary of living English.
While we were cramming to learn English or Mandarin, we forgot to learn the vocabulary of the foreign language of our feelings.
"The reason for the change is all about extending the bee's commitment to its purpose, which long has been not only to help students improve their spelling, but also to increase the vocabulary, learn concepts and develop correct English usage, " she said.
Because Cox favors techniques and plantings gleaned from many epochs, cultures and movements, he has a bigger, more flexible design vocabulary than garden designers known specifically for their modernist, French-formal or romantic English leanings Cox likes it all.
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Instead, the assimilation of elements of French into English produced Middle English and, with it, the basic profile of the language we still speak: a large vocabulary of Germanic and French-derived words organized with a simplified Germanic grammar.
The subtleties of metaphor, the economy of vocabulary, the intelligence of rhyme mean little when your only interest is second-guessing the English examiner.
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