Given such ffuctuation in what we mean by the 'vocabulary' of English and the problems in counting it, any estimate of its increase in size since 1776 must be viewed sceptically. Yet it seems certain that the vocabulary has increased significandy. In a sample of words from the OED (the first shape or sense on each page of volume 1), 393 of 1,019 are first attested after 1776. Those figures suggest that the pre-1776 vocabulary (626 words in the sample) has increased by 63 per cent, but are suspect because of the selectivity of the OED and the sample.

The most convenient source for estimating an increase in the size of the English vocabulary is the Chronological English Dictionary (Finkenstaedt, Leisi & Wolff 1970; reviewed byDerolez 1972, also 1975). However, that work must be used with caution because it is based on The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a selection from the OED, and the latter is not reliable for the earliest dates of use of words, although it is the best record we have. Of the 80,506 dated words the CED covers, 5.4 per cent originated in Old English, 18.9 per cent in Middle English, and 75.7 per cent in Modern English. Of the latter, about one-third originated after 1776 (a 34 per cent increase over pre-1776 vocabulary).

An indication of the caution with which such figures must be viewed, however, is the fact that the Chronological English Dictionary also indicates that of the words originating after 1776, 51 per cent were coined in the mid-nineteenth century (1826-75) and only 4 per cent in the early twentieth century (1901-50). Clearly what those figures show is not the growth of the vocabulary, but the extent of the lexicographer's sources. Such a caution is applicable to almost all statistical conclusions based on OED materials. Nevertheless, it seems intuitively obvious that the English vocabulary has grown and continues to do so. Objective support for that obvious intuition runs into problems of documentation, continuity, and identification.

• The site of the vocabulary

The English vocabulary has grown much in size since 1776. Exactly how much is difficult to say even approximately because there are no accurate counts of the number of words used in English either in 1776 or today. Estimates of the size of the vocabulary based upon dictionaries are ffawed

• The growth of the vocabulary

Change that is on-going in present-day English is easiest to see in the vocabulary, although it certainly exists in all aspects of language (Barber 1964; Foster 1968). In recent times, intercommunication between the UK and the US and between each of those countries and the rest of the English-speaking world

• The study of the English vocabulary

Vocabulary study has a long history, going back in the Western world to Plato's Cratylus. The study of English vocabulary, however, received a sharp boost with the interest of members of the Philological Society in making a New English Dictionary, eventually renamed The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray, Bradley, Craigie &

• Recent and older nnologisms

The percentages of words formed in English and of those borrowed from other languages in the recent corpuses contrast strikingly with those in The Shorter OED, as reported by Thomas Finkenstaedt (1973, 118-56). In the following table, the SOED percentages represent the history of English over approximately 1,200 years, as

• Identification

The Latinate vocabulary is a particular problem for both analysis and etymology. English has borrowed so many Graeco-Latin words that it has imported much of the morphemic and morphophonemic patterning of those languages, thereby creating difficulties in analysing English morphemicaUy (Ellegard 1963) and also in identifying the etymology of new