Canonical · Craft & Focus · Magazine essay
How to Improve Your Vocabulary
Tony Randall · 1980
"Vocabulary grows fastest not from memorizing word lists but from context first (guessing a word's meaning from how it's used), then verifying with a real dictionary, then tracing the word back to its root."
Tony Randall calls words 'the most powerful drug of mankind' — and says the average adult vocabulary of 30,000 to 60,000 words is a fraction of the roughly one million words in English.
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