Writers with Extraordinary vocabularies

[hawthorns]

Just wondered if there's a specific work or writer who had you reaching for the dictionary more than usual. Shakespeare for me, but I know there's others I have forgotten...

[Darcy88]

McCarthy. Some of the words he uses aren't even in my dictionary.

[the facade]

Anthony Burgess.
That guy will get you to turn to a dictionary every sentence you read, have you cursing the day he was born as you're flicking through it, find the word and realize that it had been the most precise choice.
This process is accelerated significantly with the advent of online dictionaries.
He is amazing!

[MANICHAEAN]

E.A.Poe.
Try "The Imp of the Perverse."

[Paulclem]

China Mieville - he uses interesting and obscure words, and also makes his own up to fit the situations.

[stlukesguild]

Joyce would seem obvious.

[Lokasenna]

I think H. P. Lovecraft has to be up there - it's amazing how he can express the sentiment of 'he went completely bonkers' over and over in different forms.

[PoeticPassions]

Nabokov.

[hawthorns]

BTW--

I didn't title the thread very well. obviously there's little relationship between the words used and the writers actual vocabulary. I was just curious see what names would pop up.

[breathtest]

samuel beckett

[PeterL]

Most writers have excellent vocabularies, but the really good ones target their readers in the vocabulary. They don't want readers to be amazed by the range of the vocabulary. They do ant readers to be comfortable with the verbiage.

[Paulclem]

I read somewhere that they worked out that Shakespeare had a working vocabulary of 28,000 words on the evidence of his writing. Of course he probably had more words that he didn't use. I think the figue for a normal person was 13,000, but there are problems counting the extent of a person's vocabulary.

[hawthorns]

Most writers have excellent vocabularies, but the really good ones target their readers in the vocabulary. They don't want readers to be amazed by the range of the vocabulary. They do ant readers to be comfortable with the verbiage.

Agreed. Precision is more impressive than the words. That's one thing I liked about Flaubert.

[stlukesguild]

I read somewhere that they worked out that Shakespeare had a working vocabulary of 28,000 words on the evidence of his writing. Of course he probably had more words that he didn't use. I think the figue for a normal person was 13,000, but there are problems counting the extent of a person's vocabulary.

From what I have read on vocabulary, the average person has a working spoken vocabulary of 4,000-6,000 words, while a college professor might employ some 12,000-15,000 words. This refers solely to the spoken vocabulary. As we all know, writing is not the same as speaking and often employs more careful thought... choice of more exacting or specific words... and a conscious effort to avoid repetition of the same word.

Estimations for word recognition among adults vary greatly from a low-end of 30,000 to a high of 150,000+ with 60,000 to 75,000 being accepted as an average for a college graduate.

Shakespeare's vocabulary was undoubtedly quite a bit larger than 25,000+ words as this is the number of different words he employed in his plays and poems. This number includes a large number of words coined by the poet himself, and at least some 2,000 different names of flowers. Racine, by way of contrast, employed barely 2,000 different words in all of his plays and only used the terms "flower" and "rose". A large vocabulary may denote a degree of intelligence... but not always.

Most writers have excellent vocabularies, but the really good ones target their readers in the vocabulary. They don't want readers to be amazed by the range of the vocabulary. They do (w)ant readers to be comfortable with the verbiage.

I'm not certain to what degree writers "target" the comfort zone of their reader's vocabulary. Most writers, it would seem, write for an audience that they imagine as being not unlike themselves. I doubt that Shakespeare or Proust or Joyce or Henry James set out to impress their readers with their vocabulary pyrotechnics. They simply loved words and word-play. By the same token, Racine and Hemingway were not setting out to make themselves accessible to a dumbed-down audience. Rather, they sought something of a "classical" simplicity, clarity, and lack of ornament and undoubtedly imagined an audience that sought the same.

As the audience, we have the advantage of being able to appreciate either approach.

[PeterL]

Agreed. Precision is more impressive than the words. That's one thing I liked about Flaubert.

Yes, one word is worth a thousand picures, if one uses the right word.

[Paulclem]

I read somewhere that they worked out that Shakespeare had a working vocabulary of 28,000 words on the evidence of his writing. Of course he probably had more words that he didn't use. I think the figue for a normal person was 13,000, but there are problems counting the extent of a person's vocabulary.

From what I have read on vocabulary, the average person has a working spoken vocabulary of 4,000-6,000 words, while a college professor might employ some 12,000-15,000 words. This refers solely to the spoken vocabulary. As we all know, writing is not the same as speaking and often employs more careful thought... choice of more exacting or specific words... and a conscious effort to avoid repetition of the same word.

Estimations for word recognition among adults vary greatly from a low-end of 30,000 to a high of 150,000+ with 60,000 to 75,000 being accepted as an average for a college graduate.

Shakespeare's vocabulary was undoubtedly quite a bit larger than 25,000+ words as this is the number of different words he employed in his plays and poems. This number includes a large number of words coined by the poet himself, and at least some 2,000 different names of flowers. Racine, by way of contrast, employed barely 2,000 different words in all of his plays and only used the terms "flower" and "rose". A large vocabulary may denote a degree of intelligence... but not always.

Most writers have excellent vocabularies, but the really good ones target their readers in the vocabulary. They don't want readers to be amazed by the range of the vocabulary. They do (w)ant readers to be comfortable with the verbiage.

I'm not certain to what degree writers "target" the comfort zone of their reader's vocabulary. Most writers, it would seem, write for an audience that they imagine as being not unlike themselves. I doubt that Shakespeare or Proust or Joyce or Henry James set out to impress their readers with their vocabulary pyrotechnics. They simply loved words and word-play. By the same token, Racine and Hemingway were not setting out to make themselves accessible to a dumbed-down audience. Rather, they sought something of a "classical" simplicity, clarity, and lack of ornament and undoubtedly imagined an audience that sought the same.

As the audience, we have the advantage of being able to appreciate either approach.

From what I read, the method they used to count was to go through the dictionary and mark any words they knew, which is different to the speaking vocab as you pointed out. Considering the growth of the number of words available to the modern reader, a working vocab or 26/28 thousand is impressive.

I doubt that Shakespeare or Proust or Joyce or Henry James set out to impress their readers with their vocabulary pyrotechnics. They simply loved words and word-play.

Agreed. Shakespeare would have been used to a wider social representation in his audience than we perhaps get today. His plays would have had to satisfy those in the pit and those in the balconies. This was also no doubt adressed by the actors playing to the crowd.

[Heteronym]

Well, in the Portuguese language, I'd say José Saramago, Aquilino Ribeiro and Agustina Bessa-Luís are the ones that are teaching me new vocabulary all the time.

[hawthorns]

What's mind blowing to me is that our greatest literature and music came from ink, quill, and candlelight. Not that it would have made a difference, but imagine Shakespeare's reaction to word processors, online dic/thesauruses, publishers, kindles, etc. Or, Mozart's to recording software, mp3's, and iPods (not that he needed those either).

[dfloyd]

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dr. Seuss

[V.Darkbloom]

David Foster Wallace

[Raven Falcon.]

John Milton's vocabulary outranges Shakespeare's.

Read Paradise Lost and you will know that it is harder and vocabulary denser than even Shakespeare's hardest works.

Shakespeare's greatness lies not in the range of his vocabulary alone, but it lies in his conscientiousness in choosing words to construct sentences.

The artist's ability to put words together into heart-rending to earth-shattering sentences should be more admired than his use of rare, sometimes unneeded words. (I am referring to The Artist, not Shakespeare here)

That is why writing is an art to me. It's about the ability of the artist to articulate the physical and psychological depths of his world (be it real or fictional) on papers using bricks which we call words.

If anyone is to be admired because of their usage of extraordinary words, then its the ever-boring and ever-pretentious professors.

Look at academic papers. How many of them are written with grace and elegance? Not many, because of most academicians seem to think that using brain-numbing syntax and dictionary-crying vocabulary credits them with the highest literary merit.

That is why we make a distinction between a literary author, magazine author, popular culture author, and an academic author.

In the measurement of how frequent rare words appear, the academic author often wins; in the measurement of creating a synergy from words, the literary author has proven time and time again to be the final word.

I hereby insist that we make two definitions of the term literature, as we make two definitions of the term theory.

[hawthorns]

John Milton's vocabulary outranges Shakespeare's.

Read Paradise Lost and you will know that it is harder and vocabulary denser than even Shakespeare's hardest works.

Shakespeare's greatness lies not in the range of his vocabulary alone, but it lies in his conscientiousness in choosing words to construct sentences.

The artist's ability to put words together into heart-rending to earth-shattering sentences should be more admired than his use of rare, sometimes unneeded words. (I am referring to The Artist, not Shakespeare here)

That is why writing is an art to me. It's about the ability of the artist to articulate the physical and psychological depths of his world (be it real or fictional) on papers using bricks which we call words.

If anyone is to be admired because of their usage of extraordinary words, then its the ever-boring and ever-pretentious professors.

Look at academic papers. How many of them are written with grace and elegance? Not many, because of most academicians seem to think that using brain-numbing syntax and dictionary-crying vocabulary credits them with the highest literary merit. That is why we make a distinction between a literary author, magazine author, popular culture author, and an academic author.

In the measurement of how frequent rare words appear, the academic author often wins; in the measurement of creating a synergy from words, the literary author has proven time and time again to be the final word.

I hereby insist that we make two definitions of the term literature, as we make two definitions of the term theory.

Good point. "Journalists/bloggers" screams to mind with that too :lol:

[stlukesguild]

I don't know if Milton's actual vocabulary as employed in his writings outnumbers Shakespeare's, but I wouldn't be surprised if his actual spoken vocabulary did considering Milton's brilliance, erudition, and mastery of various foreign languages.

[irinmisfit92]

I agree with Burgess and Nabokov. <3

[Caliban's Isle]

It's been a while since I read George Eliot, but I seem to remember her works being rather complex. Maybe it had more to do with sentence structure than vocabulary, but I think that was fairly high-level too.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I think Herman Melville and even maybe J.R.R. Tolkien could be added to the list.


I think H. P. Lovecraft has to be up there - it's amazing how he can express the sentiment of 'he went completely bonkers' over and over in different forms.

Not to mention the infinite ways he could say, "This is so scary I can't even explain how scary it is."

[Mojtaba-Iraqi]

For me, all the English writers represent a realm of new and ambigous vocabularies. That's why I fear getting away from my Oxford dictionary. However as mentioned, I really get confused when I read Paradise Lost; yet, I enjoy his imagination and the structures the writer employed.

[King Mob]

Tommy Pynchon. I will always remember fondly the great phrase from Gravity's Rainbow: "...a blow to the genital brain, however pixilated".

[Ser Nevarc]

J. L. Borges

[kev67]

Thomas Hardy. Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles last year, I noted down all the unfamiliar vocab and looked them up on the internet. There were at least four categories of obscurity:


local dialect, e.g. chitterlings, barton, carking
latinate, e.g. propinquity, flexuous, ebullition
obsolete, e.g. ostler, postillion, andiron
technical, e.g. lanchets, siliceous

[MorpheusSandman]

IIRC, the number of different words employed in Shakespeare's plays is about 25,000, while those in Milton's works was slightly more than half that. I seem to recall reading this in the Norton/Oxford Shakespeare, but I don't know where they got their stats from. An important thing to remember is that Shakespeare wrote much, much more than Milton did (on sheer word count, I mean) so he had a much greater opportunity to use more words. Milton was undoubtedly the more learned of the two, though, and if he had written more he probably would've eclipsed Shakespeare. I also seem to recall reading that there were over 30,000 different words in Joyce's Ulysses. I'm sure there's controversy over exactly how to measure a vocabulary, like whether or not plural forms count as a different word.

[ennison]

JG Ballard

[dfw]

gonna have to go with
david foster wallace

read infinite jest and you will know what i mean

[Raven Falcon.]

Infinite Jest...does it has even a threadbare story?

[dfw]

uhhh, like is it weak on plot?


it' plot is very complex
i didn't read it for its plot though
nobody does i think


there were plenty of individual scenes, many seemingly unrelated to the plot, and these scenes (what's the word for these?) were the best parts

[Jackson Richardson]

I'm too lazy to keep looking up dictionaries. I read on and get the sense from the context. That's how I learnt to speak in the first place.

PS I'm reading Walter Scott, and he helpfully provides a glossary of Scots words. I am turning to it now and again, but by and large I get the sense from the context, as said above.

[caddy_caddy]

Mahmoud Darwish.
He's extremely creative in terms of voc. He even coins new words that you can never come across anywhere else.
He's out of this world.

[jayat]

Wasn't it jargon and specially-made-for-"clockworm orange" novel? Just asking....

[jayat]

Right now and in Spanish, J.L.Borges. Great.

[cafolini]

Right now and in Spanish, J.L.Borges. Great.

Of all the ones who commented about Borges, you are one of the best at misunderstanding him. You probably should join the Argentine soccer "Barra Brava." LOL

[Bustrofedon]

Nabokov springs to mind, as PP said. David Foster Wallace made me look up a few but they may have all been drugs or schizoid conditions.

[hannah_arendt]

G.G. Marquez, J.L. Borges, Gombrowicz,B. Schulz

[jayat]

Of all the ones who commented about Borges, you are one of the best at misunderstanding him. You probably should join the Argentine soccer "Barra Brava." LOL
I don't know what you are talking about, but it makes me smile. Thanks.

[jayat]

G.G. Marquez, J.L. Borges, Gombrowicz,B. Schulz


I wish I had ten lifes to spend in a colossal library. Reading, of course. Stupid dreams of mine....

[hannah_arendt]

I wish I had ten lifes to spend in a colossal library. Reading, of course. Stupid dreams of mine....

I recommend you Gombrowicz and Brunon Schulz. Schulz is classified as magic realism. He really impressed me when i read him for the first time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Schulz

[jayat]

I recommend you Gombrowicz and Brunon Schulz. Schulz is classified as magic realism. He really impressed me when i read him for the first time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Schulz

Juan Rulfo....and the writer of El túnel (The Tunnel, I suppose...). I dont remember if Rulfo is its writter or don't. Anyway, okey, I get it. I've never heard of it. First time. But first I would spend a quite long time with Borges. I feel I owe it from my time in college.

[hannah_arendt]

Juan Rulfo....and the writer of El túnel (The Tunnel, I suppose...). I dont remember if Rulfo is its writter or don't. Anyway, okey, I get it. I've never heard of it. First time. But first I would spend a quite long time with Borges. I feel I owe it from my time in college.

If you tell me what kind of literature you like, I can recommend you more polish books.

[islandclimber]

Juan Rulfo....and the writer of El túnel (The Tunnel, I suppose...). I dont remember if Rulfo is its writter or don't. Anyway, okey, I get it. I've never heard of it. First time. But first I would spend a quite long time with Borges. I feel I owe it from my time in college.

El Túnel is by Ernesto Sabato. Talented writer.

On another note. William Gass, author of another work named The Tunnel, is a writer with quite an incredible vocabulary.

Bruno Schulz is an amazing writer, though his output was curtailed by Karl Gunther's malice. Wojciech Jerzy Has adapted his Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą into a brilliant film.

[hannah_arendt]

El Túnel is by Ernesto Sabato. Talented writer.

On another note. William Gass, author of another work named The Tunnel, is a writer with quite an incredible vocabulary.

Bruno Schulz is an amazing writer, though his output was curtailed by Karl Gunther's malice. Wojciech Jerzy Has adapted his Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą into a brilliant film.

Do you have your favourite work of him (Schulz)? Unfortunately, he isn`t very popular in Poland.

[jayat]

I have books to read from here to the moon and back again, but thank you hannah, island...
Now, I'm reading Shakespeare in original version so it takes me quite a time to get the meaning, although I prefer so rather than lose a bit of his speeches' meanings (note the plural in the last word). My hatt off, and also my skull to keep all the knowledge inside (ja...ja....). Well...

[hannah_arendt]

Have a good time with Shakespeare:) What are you reading now?

[DavidO]

Alison Bechdel of the comic book "Fun Home," and the famous "Bechdel Test." Her usage of words is so precise, and she was invited to sit on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

[jayat]

"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad. I changed books because I become saturated with so much lightly Greatness. Yesterday afternoon I finished Twelfth Night...

[Corona]

Aside from the most known ones, italian Carlo Emilio Gadda is surely one. He was a brilliant writer and his baroque style happened to be a mix of so many languages and dialects to make a reading withouth an apposite ditionary very difficult.

[JBI]

Sima Xiangru, Ban Gu, Su Shi, Qu Yuan. Su Shi being the most accessible, but his range as a scholar is unparalleled showing a sophistication of language.

[hannah_arendt]

"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad. I changed books because I become saturated with so much lightly Greatness. Yesterday afternoon I finished Twelfth Night...

I am reading now "Lord of the rings" and "Magician: Apprentice" by R. Feist.

[All A1s Exams]

Virtually every writer who specializes in literary criticism uses difficult, and sometimes arcane, terminology. I find difficult words ubiquitously; from the opinions in newspapers to the literary books that teachers recommend - and I feel shameful to conceding the fact that I still need a dictionary to help me overcome my English mastery threshold.