Research

Here is an interesting piece on how two statisticians estimated how many words William Shakespeare may have known.

This argument was repeated with a third, fourth, fifth sample, and so on. Each sample corresponds to discovering a new and different complete works of Shakespeare. For each sample, it is possible to estimate the number of new words that appear that have not appeared before. With each new sample, the number of new words decreases, but the total number of words used increases. Eventually, given enough samples, the number of new words approaches about 35,000. This means that in addition the 31,534 words that Shakespeare knew and used, there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn’t use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.

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