“Sticks and Stones and Words that Hurt”
June 3, 2025
The English language has a large and complex vocabulary, with estimates ranging from 1million to over 1.6 million words, depending on how words are counted. Most unabridged dictionaries, contain over 600,000 entries, including obsolete and historical words, whereas dictionaries focused on current usage may have significantly fewer entries. Either way, that’s still a lot of words with which we can do harm or good.
Supposedly of the 600,000 words at our disposal, 300,000 are technical words used by scientists and medical…