According to an article entitled The words in the mental cupboard published by the BBC, "An ordinary person, one who has not been to university say, would know about 35,000 quite easily."
The Unix dictionary (included here as unix-words) contains far too many
ridiculous words that even Google has trouble explaining, such as zuurveldt,
cholecystenterorrhaphy and nonly:
$ cat unix-words | wc -l
235886
Even enable1.txt, the more verbose alternative to the Official Scrabble
Players Dictionary (ospd.txt, which is limited to words of 8 letters or
less) used by Words with Friends, contains more words than any English
speaking adult would reasonably be familiar with:
$ cat enable1.txt | wc -l
172823
popular.txt represents the common subset of words found in both enable1.txt
and Wiktionary's word frequency lists, which are in turn compiled by
statistically analyzing a sample of 29 million words used in English TV and
movie scripts.
$ cat popular.txt | wc -l
25322
These are 25,322 words that everyone should be familiar with.
-
popular.txt: the list of common words described above. -
enable1.txt: the ENABLE word list. -
ospd.txt: the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary word list. -
unix-words: a copy of the Unix dictionary,/usr/share/dict/words. -
filter.py: prints the words that two word lists have in common, which is howpopular.txtwas produced:$ python3 filter.py enable1.txt <wiktionary-word-list> > popular.txt