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I can’t remember if this question has been asked here, but it comes up in other venues, at least, and I’m in the mood to write a little about it so…”Do writers really need a big vocabulary?”
That’s kind of like asking a world-renowned chef if she really needs all those spices, herbs, ingredients, all those pots and pans and tools.
My answer to the question is a resounding “Yes.” Writers not only need a big (no, HUGE) vocabulary, but they need to know many things about those words beside spelling and the first definition in a modern dictionary. They need to know where the word came from–its language of origin, its meaning in that language, the changes it’s gone through over the centuries (some very common words have a…um…colorful history. That sedate little white-haired woman in pastel might have been…an exotic dancer.)
This is not to say that the writer needs to use all his/her words in one work (or even a dozen works.) I know words I don’t use (or haven’t used yet) in fiction. I know what “epicene” means, for instance, but haven’t found a need for it in any of the stories. The extra words–the words a writer knows, understands when reading, but doesn’t use–are part of a writer’s library of language, and the larger that library, the more chance that the one right word will be available when she or he needs it.
Writers need particularly large stores of certain kinds of words, both in grammatical terms and in cognitive processing terms. We need verbs…lots and lots of good clean active verbs…to power our sentences. Did John walk, stride, saunter, stagger, prowl, trudge, or perambulate? Each word suggests something about the character and the situation. Confident John striding along the quay on a brisk morning is not the same person as tired John trudging up the hill after a hard day’s work in the hayfield. Drunk, sick, or wounded John may stagger a few steps…well-fed John may saunter through the park after lunch…and well-educated John the Marquis of Something may perambulate the ballroom, eyeing the daughters of local gentry with a patronizing eye. But John can also walk to the corner store to buy a paper.
A full storehouse of verbs helps fend off the temptation to hang adverbs all over the sentence. If you have “saunter” you won’t say “John walked slowly and aimlessly” and if you have “trudge” you won’t say “John walked slowly and tiredly up the hill.” If you have the words for horses’ gaits, you won’t be stuck with “ran slowly” when what you want is “canter” (or, for western riders, “lope.”)
The other grammatical group writers need in abundance is nouns. Names of things. Start gathering a storehouse of concrete nouns first (nothing wrong with abstract nouns, but be sure to grab and stuff in your sack the concrete ones.) For instance, in a story I read for a contest years ago, the writer did not know the names of anything much on a sailing vessel, and was reduced to saying “the horizontal wooden bar thing at the bottom of the sail.” Another writer whose work I read before submission did not know the name of the piece of tack that holds the saddle on the horse.
Not knowing the name of something you need for your story means you need to find out the name. For ships and horses and horse tack, it’s pretty easy to look up, even if you can’t find someone to ask in person. Yet a surprising number of novice (and some not so novice) writers will not bother. And so we get “that horizontal wooden bar thing” instead of “boom” and “bellyband” instead of “girth” or (in western riding) “cinch.”
Writers need a lot of nouns. All the names for everything that appears in their writing. All the names for the tools people use to make stuff. Names of foods, names of materials, names of implements, machines, parts of machines. In most writing, you can’t make up names for things that already have names without at least admitting you’re doing it. (“I know this is usually called a half-round gouge, but my dad used his only for carving roses, so our name for it was the rose gouge.”)
In fantasy, you can make up words for things–and I do–but making up new words for everything will make the writing look silly (and incomprehensible.) Readers will accept that you speared a cragunfish–OK, it’s a kind of fish in that imaginary land–but if you then insist on having characters cook it on a moddle, which turns out to be a grill, over a fire of mirchin, which turns out to be charcoal, and eat it with a deehaw, which turns out to be just like a fork…that’s too much. Spear the cragunfish, slap it on the grill, and eat it with a fork or your fingers. Otherwise, in the traditional SF form of this point, you’re calling a rabbit a smerp. And more than one brand-new word at a time makes it hard to impossible for readers to figure out the meaning by context.
Back to dictionary words. Words in groups sometimes behave differently than when alone (just like the rest of us.) The right word–in its meaning–may be the wrong word in its fit with the other words. How can this be? Sound. When the right words come together, they dance like a pair of well-rehearsed dancers. The sounds they make (when read aloud, or heard in the mind) are the right music for that part of the work. Consider Shakespeare with Lady Macbeth’s famous speech about seeing blood on her hands. Once he’s come to “the multitudinous seas…” could he possibly say “makes red?” The multitudinous seas are wonderful, rolling, heaving like seas–this is one case where you don’t want to mess with the surrounding words. “Red” blood is the problem. Hmm. OK, a fancier word for red? Scarlet, crimson…no. Breaks the rolling rhythm. And if you’re Shakespeare, which I’m not, you have in your storehouse of words…”incarnadine” and you also have the sense of prosody, and the sheer chutzpah, to throw that into the crowd…and to see them get it, all the ones who never heard the word before, who can’t really read. They get it. But suppose Shakespeare hadn’t had that word? Suppose the line had had to be “And make the green seas red…” which is a striking visual but completely lacks the power of his version.
And yet…men of Shakespeare’s era (well, close enough) chose a much smaller vocabulary when they compiled the King James version of the Bible. Different task, different set of words. No less powerful, no less melodic in its prosody…and those working on it did not lack large vocabularies…but they chose the words they used for a different purpose. Older inflections were still in use: “maketh” and “saith” and “art”. But they chose directness: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” Green was enough. Green was fertile, edible, what a sheep wanted. They didn’t need emerald or mint-green, or anything but…green, with all that implied. Same with the “still waters.” Not silent, not motionless, not reflective, not mirrorlike…just still.
So–back to what vocabulary can do for the writer. A big vocabulary gives you choices. When our son, who’s autistic, was little, there was a notion among some that autistic kids should only be allowed to learn a core vocabulary someone had determined they would need, because they probably would never learn more than fifty words. (Fewer than some chimps learned in Sign.) One of his speech therapists, in fact, thought she knew what words he needed, and informed me haughtily (she had a PhD she was proud of) that “Seven isn’t a very useful word” when I told her he liked to count and was trying to learn to say it. The phone number starts with 7. Our Zip Code has two 7s in it. And it’s not “useful” to be able to say your phone number or your Zip? ANYway. (And, despite the ANYway, needless to say I ignored all such advice and our son has a vocabulary far larger than his ability to use it easily. He discovered dictionaries.)
If you have only fifty words, there are relatively few things you can say (or write) that will be understood, because the mathematical rules of permutation and combination don’t work with words-as-language. The order of words is part of their meaning, in English and other positional languages. If you have fifty nouns, there are only fifty things you can talk about. If you want to talk about something for which you have no words…it’s hard. Understanding is compromised. The writer’s reduced to the clumsiness of that horizontal wooden bar or the bellyband.
So: big vocabularies are a big help. But then (as with a kitchen full of pots, pans, tools, ingredients) the writer has to learn how to use them. Too much tarragon spoils the dish; burn the garlic and you’ll wish you hadn’t; get careless with a knife and you can lose blood (and flesh.) The best cook can prepare a delicious meal from the simplest (and fewest ingredients and a couple of pans)…and the best writer can tell a story with a limited vocabulary. But behind both is the complexity of a great art, which they use when they need to.
Comment by Kerry aka Trouble — January 25, 2012 @ 7:13 pm
So many people use words by their dictionary meanings and forget they have connotations, too. The more words I know for a thing, the more choices I have to convey the feeling I want applied to it. The difference between a story and a tale is in the eyes of the beholder.
P.S. you for got to close the paren between fewest and ingredients in the last paragraph.
Comment by MaryW — January 25, 2012 @ 7:26 pm
We use different words in speaking and writing. The oral vocabulary is limited because we are usually trying to communicate a thought in a relatively quick fashion. The written word seems to communicate more description or a greater level of precision. Now if I could just write coherent sentences…
Besides, you cannot win at scrabble without a fairly comprehensive vocabulary. With three boys there is a competitve drive at just about any activity. To win at scrabble reading is necessary.
Hope there are no typos. The second cataract surgery was today and no more glasses! Unfortunately, it does take a few days for the eye/brain connection to completely mesh.
Comment by Kip Colegrove — January 25, 2012 @ 10:40 pm
I have to be careful when writing a sermon not to get too carried away by the poetic and technical aspects of word choice…yet reading and writing poetry and having gone deeply into technical disciplines like theology and linguistics do help the sermon. It’s sort of like knowing how to tune the same machinery for different events.
Comment by elizabeth — January 25, 2012 @ 11:20 pm
Thanks, Kerry. I would gladly blame interruptions while writing, but there weren’t any during that sentence. Just brain not paying attention. Fixed now.
Comment by elizabeth — January 25, 2012 @ 11:29 pm
MaryW: Many of the things we say in conversation are fairly simple and routine, in situations where we already have a lot of the surrounding information–I think the vocabulary limitation comes from that, in part. Conversations with my husband range from the many brief ones that don’t need many words (e.g. keeping track of who’s where and what the plans are for the day) to the “real” conversations where we’re both exploring a relatively new topic. Because we both have multiple degrees, the vocabulary level can jump levels very fast when we get going.
Congratulations on the successful second cataract surgery. I’ve got them in my future; the left eye’s already a bit of a problem at times.
Comment by elizabeth — January 25, 2012 @ 11:30 pm
Kip: exactly.
Comment by David Watson — January 25, 2012 @ 11:32 pm
Excellent essay on the value of vocabulary. As usual, you have nailed it on the head. DRW
Comment by elizabeth — January 25, 2012 @ 11:39 pm
Thanks. BTW, how was the rain at your place?
Comment by Roberta — January 26, 2012 @ 2:34 am
My children used to moan at me when I made them look up words and even examine the root words and those things like if they are French, Middle English and all those other neat notations in a dictionary. MOM! I don’t need to know all that. My teachers don’t want all that information. I just would tell them to do what I tell them. Then they started to have to take all those tests for college and the eye-rolling and moaning disappeared. Momma’s weird fascination with knowing all the definitions of the word and the origin of words actually helped them score higher on the tests. Momma’s stupidity actually meant that they understood foreign languages in college.
My kids claim that I am best known for saying, “Words having meaning, so use them properly.” They are correct. That’s why I would correct them when they used words incorrectly and look them up in the dictionary. But who’s right now? I hear my oldest daughter repeating that phrase to her own 2 year old son. And that boy has a fantastic vocabulary. His daycare teachers remark about his ever-growing vocabulary that sounds more like a 7 or 8 year old rather than a 2 year old.
Comment by ellen — January 26, 2012 @ 3:05 am
Oh, it makes SO much difference to a book if the author has an ample vocabulary and the skill to use it. I recently bought a book with a fascinating subject, but the author’s very limited vocabulary and writing skill made for a book that was merely “OK”, instead of the great book it could have been, had someone with more skill written it. I only read it once, being thoroughly spoiled by your books, all of which I’ve read numerous times. Looking forward to “Echoes” , and like so many others reading Deed and the first two books in anticipation…
Comment by Rolv — January 26, 2012 @ 6:36 am
Spot on. I remember when I began working as a missionary in Taiwan, frequently being unable to say what I wanted to say – because I only could say what I COULD say (in Chinese). Thus, when preaching, I was forced to keep it simple and to the point, and was unable to spin off subject. So there are certain advantages in professional speakers having to use a foreign language. 🙂
Wishing you well with your cataract surgery. My wife recently had cataracta complicata surgery on her right eye, and it seems to have gone well. The date for the next eye is not yet settled.
Mary W, I’m adding my congratulations to Elizabeth’s.
Comment by Rolv — January 26, 2012 @ 6:40 am
Kip,
Definitely. I don’t know how it is where you are, but here in Norway, still not few pastors are just reading their sermon manuscript aloud; seemingly forgetting that the point is to communicate a message, and that reading a sermon and listening to it are vastly different.
Comment by Naomi — January 26, 2012 @ 8:56 am
The old Readers Digest used to have a section, how to increase your word power, worth it’s weight in gold! can’t live without my thesaurus and frequently swear at the one on MS Word!!! There’s a wonderful TV programme on the BBC called ‘QI’, which is also brilliant in dismissing preconceived ideas…
Comment by elizabeth — January 26, 2012 @ 9:23 am
My mother took Reader’s Digest and introduced me to that vocabulary exercise quite early. I loved it. Then by the time I was in high school, I was getting them all right almost every month–but read the descriptions anyway. Learned a lot from that, but even more from Latin class. My thesaurus (a high school graduation present) has gone walkabout and I have not been able to find it for YEARS. I suspect our son took it and put it “someplace” in much the same way I leave books “someplace” and rediscover them later. I really, REALLY miss having the thesaurus right here beside me (where one of the dictionaries is.)
Comment by Daniel Glover — January 26, 2012 @ 10:12 am
Elizabeth, I know you have a big vocabulary, but …
abstract nounds,
???
That’s why you have proofreaders for published works (and anything around work here that’s supposed to be passed on “as is”).
Comment by elizabeth — January 26, 2012 @ 10:36 am
Daniel, that’s exactly why we have, and need, proofreaders. Or a new prescription for our eyeglasses. Or both.
Comment by Jenn — January 26, 2012 @ 1:28 pm
Elizabeth,
This was a great blog. I once read a book where the only facial expression anyone had was grimace and another where the only color for red was carmine.
Rolv,
I experienced the same thing living in France and learning French. I didn’t have to give sermons (thank God) but even trying to speak beyond basic needs got very frustrating.
On a side, my favorite scrabble words to keep up my sleeve are: shoji and djin. I love reading the scrabble dictionary.
Comment by Annabel (Mrs Redboots) — January 26, 2012 @ 1:46 pm
Agree with the preachers! I do write my sermons out in full, but the idea is to try not to use the text! Also to write as one speaks, rather like writing conversation all the time.
(And can we not talk about losing blood and flesh to one’s kitchen knives… I have a rather sore left little finger just now from where I took a chunk out of it cutting up swedes – rutabaga, if you’re American, which I’m not – for our Burns’ Night Supper last night).
Comment by elizabeth — January 26, 2012 @ 1:56 pm
Annabel: I suspect anyone who cooks enough makes a few sacrifices to the Sharp, but I sympathize. I guess this isn’t the day to tell the ham knife story.
Jenn: Glad you found it fun and useful. I’m off now to turn in the 28 pages (single-spaced but with pictures) of the wildlife management report.
Comment by Kip Colegrove — January 26, 2012 @ 4:41 pm
Nice to see comments from other preachers! I’m not surprised that a discussion of vocabulary caught our attention. It’s a frequent point of controversy in preaching.
I consider the sermon a form of performance art and, while I compose a full text, I don’t stick to it slavishly. More important, though, is that I write the text to be heard aloud, delivered with vigor and such elocutionary technique as I can muster.
Another thing that helps on Sunday morning is that my wife and I maintain the practice of reading aloud to one another. Usually one of us is doing something that takes a while and does not require the sort of mental concentration that would be thrown off by following the story.
I find the habit of converting text to speech for shared enjoyment to be a great enrichment of domestic life–and not only when children are involved!
Comment by Dave Ring — January 26, 2012 @ 6:22 pm
Regarding words, George MacDonald said (in The Princess and Curdie), “You must mind exactly what words I use, because although the right words cannot do exactly what I want them to do, the wrong words will certainly do what I do not want them to do”.
Comment by Mike D — January 26, 2012 @ 8:26 pm
Many of us will have a large vocabulary.
http://testyourvocab.com
will give a good estimate (42,800 for me).
I’ve been a bookworm all my life which has helped.
But though I have a paper and a couple of electronic Thesauruses, I don’t find them of much use.
The problem is that I know more words than the thesaurus does since they tend to miss out many that are in a college dictionary.
* I first noticed this when trying to remember the word “obsolescent” which was not in the word processor’s thesaurus nor in my penguin paper one. My starting point was the word “obsolete” – same if I had started from “old” of course. I think I eventually rang someone up and asked “obsolete but still in operational use like the Swordfish topeado bomber at Tarento”.
I then used this as a test, it wasn’t in the thesaurus that came with the Merriam-Webster CD dictionary nor in those in several libraries and I eventually got a hit using a reference book meant for serious word-game players.
* Can anyone suggest other unfindable words that are in a desk dictionary ?
Much later I figured out a general method – it needs an electronic dictionary with full search.
= list all words with “obsolete” in the definition paragraph =
Merriam-Webster gives a dozen, including obsolescent, obsolescence and dinosaur (and four which have obsolescent in the definition)
* English residents can try this with the online OED – your public library’s web site should explain how to sign on with your library card number and library county.
* And for homework, find a word beginng with g that means pellets of snow or ice.
Comment by Barb M — January 26, 2012 @ 10:51 pm
You’re point’s clear and correct but it’s he not she who speaks of making the multitudinous green seas incarnidine (II,ii, 50-54)
Comment by Gareth — January 27, 2012 @ 7:44 am
I still hear my mother’s voice in my head, and I’m told my daughter hears mine, saying ‘Look it up on the dictionary’.
Gareth
Comment by Richard — January 27, 2012 @ 8:24 am
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’”
I wish I’d kept my father’s omnibus copy of Alice.
Comment by Mike D — January 27, 2012 @ 9:01 am
Richard @25
“I wish I’d kept my father’s omnibus copy of Alice.”
Try for a used copy of _The Annotated Alice_ full text plus notes by Martin Gardner
For just the two texts, Gutenberg of course
Little Egret in Walton-on-Thames
Comment by Jonathan Schor — January 27, 2012 @ 9:01 am
This is a very good conversation. I have always enjoyed words and playing with words, mostly puns or making strange associations.
It adds so much to a book to have an author with a large and varied vocabulary, such as Ms. Moon.
Comment by Richard — January 27, 2012 @ 9:36 am
MikeD: Having found (though not by the set method) a word that fits your “homework” challenge, I don’t think it will appear in many college dictionaries. Not if you mean students’ own dictionaries as opposed to the big ones in the reference library. The word certainly isn’t in the old Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (1600 pages of definitions not counting appendices, weighs 3lbs) on which I still rely.
Not that I’m rushing to defend thesauruses; far from it.
Comment by Dave Ring — January 27, 2012 @ 11:41 am
Sounds like Humpty Dumpty was a lawyer or a politician.
Comment by Jonathan Schor — January 27, 2012 @ 12:54 pm
Then there is this too, Charles Dickens was paid by the word so he wrote a lot of them. While I don’t think book authors are paid that way, dense books tend to be better than light ones.
Comment by Mike D — January 27, 2012 @ 7:21 pm
Richard @28
That word begining with g is in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate and of the two dictionaries supplied with my Kindle it’s in the Oxford Dictionary of English but not the Oxford American Dictionary.
My family too had a one volume Chambers but it was earlier than the 20C edition. We used it for Scrabble and the many Scottish words often caused amusement.
Try looking up “isabeline” (yellow)
Homework today, a word meaning Double Handful.
Little Egret in Walton-on-Thames
Comment by Richard — January 28, 2012 @ 2:32 am
No more homework for me, Mike: I’m going offline for a week.
Comment by Moira — January 29, 2012 @ 8:12 am
@Elizabeth: Your use of vocabulary is one of the many reasons I enjoy and appreciate your writing. Thank you for lavishing so much care on things like this! And I thoroughly enjoyed the post, too; you sum up the argument for verbal virtuosity with aplomb.
@Mike D – Thanks for the link, I love that kind of thing. And I couldn’t agree more about the difficulties in using a thesaurus or dictionary. I certainly don’t know more words than the thesaurus (at least I don’t think I do) but I’ve noticed a very real and alarming trend in dictionaries, thanks to my Dad.
I’ve visited my Dad quite a bit in the last two years and he loves to do the crossword (and the other puzzles) in his daily paper. Has done for as long as I can remember. Well, he got me going, too, and one of our favourites (yes, favourites, since we’re talking about the UK papers, here) is a randomized grid of nine letters that form a nine-letter word. The goal is to come up with the “big” word and as many others as possible; there’s a central letter that must appear in all answers (just to make it interesting). This puzzle is a fantastic test of vocabulary, although some of the official solutions these days are a bit questionable… But I digress. My Dad has an old pocket dictionary from (probably) a good twenty to thirty years ago, and we were using that to verify some of the words we weren’t sure of or disputed in each other’s answers. I got the bright idea (because the little pocket dictionary didn’t contain all the words we came up with, even when we both agreed the words were valid) to go get a new dictionary, so I got a brand spanking new one-volume edition of the OED. It has some nice reference sections in it (handy for those crossword clues that ask for the capital of this tiny republic, or the highest mountain in that renamed-yet-again country) but I was absolutely appalled at what was missing. In the rush to “update” their content to include modern usage and technological terminology, the compilers of the OED have slashed so many older words, words that are less frequently used, words that belong in more rarefied conversation. So the little pocket dictionary actually does better in some ways than the latest OED-for-the-masses! I can only pray that the full edition of the OED is comprehensive.
When I started high school, I was issued with a Pocket OED which I have kept ever since. Over the years, I’ve toyed with the idea of replacing it but just never got around to it. Now… I’m very glad I didn’t. I’m keeping it for ever and aye!
Comment by Sharidann — January 30, 2012 @ 6:44 am
Great entry!
And true for everyone of us actually, but evenmoreso for a writer, of course.
Comment by Mike D — January 30, 2012 @ 1:34 pm
Moira @33
Thanks, but could you give the exact title (or even the ISBN) of the Oxford dictionary in question.
OED on its own usually means The Big One – twenty volumes plus four extra.
I have it (thank you book club) in the Compact Edition – one volume, magnifying glass included. ISBN 0-19-861258-3
The Shorter Oxford is two volumes (all quotations omited).
I also have a Concise Oxford and as I said my UK Kindle came withthe Oxford Dictionary of English AND the Oxford American Dictionary.
Just to confuse the Compact Oxford is different again.
Comment by Genko — January 30, 2012 @ 1:55 pm
On preaching in a non-native language. There’s a story that Suzuki Roshi (Japanese monk who came to the United States at age 55) spoke to two different congregations, one in Japanese, and the other in English. He remarked that sometimes he wished that he could speak in English to his Japanese congregation, because it seemed fresher. I found this a bit puzzling, because it’s so much more difficult to find ways to speak in a second language, especially I would think in trying to convey something like Buddhist teachings.
I asked a native Japanese speaker about this, and he explained that Buddhist teachings are pretty cliche in Japan — much like many Christian teachings are here, I suspect — and that in order to convey these teachings to an English-speaking audience, Suzuki had to think carefully and in order to find ways of saying things, which forced a freshness that he wouldn’t find in Japanese. That livened it up for him (and for his audience, too, of course — he is revered in San Francisco Zen Center).
Comment by Moira — January 30, 2012 @ 4:33 pm
@Mike – Sorry, I’m afraid I can’t give you exact details, since I last saw it months ago, it’s located on another continent, and I didn’t memorize either the exact title or the ISBN!
All I can tell you is that it’s a one-volume paperback readily available at Easons. Blue.
The one I was issued at school (an indeterminate number of years ago!) is The Pocket Oxford Dictionary (5th Edition).
Comment by Rolv — February 1, 2012 @ 5:29 am
Genko,
Yes, famiilarity can cloud understanding. Words and ideas can be so taken for granted that you don’t get the meaning.
A typical example is the final episode of “Seinfeld”, where Kramer is asked what a Samaritan is, and answers something like “an ancient people, known for being helpful”. Of course, the original listeners had quite different allusion, they knew that the Samaritan was the bad guy …
But there is also a greater danger of miscommunication when using another language; words may be used in misleading contexts and ways.
Comment by jjmcgaffey — February 14, 2012 @ 3:41 pm
I grew up with a Compact OED, and recently (a couple years ago) got my own copy. That was always the source when “Look it up!” was declared.
I _had_ the Concise OED on my Palm, and then on my Android phone – but I just had to update the phone this month and lost it. The maker doesn’t seem to have the OED at all any more – I wonder if they (Mobile Systems) lost the rights to it? Anyway.
The Concise was seriously annoying with what it left out – it had Eurotrash but not Europe! – and while it had basic derivations it didn’t have any of the citations for early uses of words that the Compact (and Full – the Compact is a photo-reduced version of the 20+ volumes into one or two volumes (depending on edition) and comes with a magnifying glass to make it readable) has that I love to read. Still, it was a lot better than any other electronic dictionary I’ve yet found for my phone.
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