Lexical Diversity Quotes

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not entirely sure what all of them meant.

I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.

Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

I have a small vocabulary, which I move around fast.

Lexical variety, eccentric constructions and punctuation, variant spellings, archaisms, the ability to pile clause on clause, the effortless incorporation of words from other languages: flexibility, and inclusiveness, is what makes English great; and diversity is what keeps it healthy and growing, exuberantly regenerating itself with rich new forms and usages.

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.

Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity - they form part of the linguistic color of a period.

So many times I feel I'm using the same words over and over, like a woman wearing the same dress every day. So boring!

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

Most people understand that the more words children are exposed to, the stronger their vocabularies will be. But fewer people are aware that the quality of the words also significantly affects brain development.

Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

The more words you have at your disposal, the more precisely you can express yourself.

Did you know that forty percent of the words used by Shakespeare were used by him only once?

I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.

The English language is more complex than calculus because numbers don't have nuances.

Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.

I always choose to use the word often instead of (unintelligible). Just changing it up, changing it up.