The Power of Words, Vocabulary, and Writing Skills

Words are beautiful, mesmerizing, and amazing. Do you feel, experience, and think of them in this way? Aren't you caught dumbstruck with wonder while coming across some of those words? Didn't you pause for a moment and find yourself completely immersed in their beauty and bliss trying to understand their depth? Or pondering over a particular word's coining or usage? Don't you feel yourself in some magical world full of beautiful, awesome, and enchanting words? There, definitely, can be such occasions in your life if you are fully receptive to them and are ready to capture those moments of enchantment.

Think for a while you are banished to a speechless, wordless zone. You have access to only signs and sounds!

Ooh! What an awkward situation would it be for you!

You can't express your feelings and moods properly. You will be struggling hard to utter sounds and move your hands, eyes, lips, and full body in motion so that you may be able to attract somebody and communicate something.

But, it is not so now. You have all the words and can say anything, and express anything with your words. And, daily, you are inventing and coining more and more words to convey more perfectly and appeal more vividly. You are uttering, perhaps, hundreds and thousands of words each hour and writing thousands of words daily. You may not even realize this fact as it has become a habit now.

Is it all not due to the enchanting power of words?

It is a well-known fact that there are a total 26 Alphabets in the English language containing 5 vowels of a, e, i, o, u, and the rest 21 consonants. But, sometimes, y is also used as a vowel depending upon the word it is grouped to.

So, It is an amazing fact to realize that these 26 letters are contributing to hundreds of thousands of words that are in use today- words of wisdom, words of love, words of magic, words of inspiration, and words of wonder- everything contained.

• According to "The Story of English" -New York, Penguin Book 1992, the Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 cataloged words and another roughly 500,000 uncatalogued words. So, it amounts to roughly more than 1,000,000 words in our vocabulary overall.
• Encyclopaedia Americana, Volume 10, 1999 mentions that there are around about 750,000 words in any abridged dictionary as of its publication date.
• Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, Volume 1, 1989 counts up to 615,000 words.
• Words need at least one vowel in a combination of consonants to be spelled as a word.
• But consonants may not be needed in some of the words like " I " or " a " which are used themselves as words.
• Sometimes we find using only a group of consonants as a word (without using vowels) in words like "Gr" or "hmm" during our normal usage.
• It is said that there are roughly 100,000-word families that are being used.
• A native educated English speaker, on average, uses 20,000 word-families whereas an uneducated may be using around 10,000 word-families.
• And, you know this simple fact that if you are to read any book, you need to keep knowledge of at least 8000-word families.

• You may have noticed that the words you use depend on your age, development, and skill level. Each person has their own capacity for language.
• Words used by a child, an adult or a more grown-up differ in volume and style.
• Similarly, the words used depend on your environment, family culture, and professional background. A mechanic, an accountant, a doctor, a scientist, a writer, and a poet- all have their own styles and abilities.
• A person in a more educated environment is enriched with more vocabulary.
• A creative writer is capable of using more descriptive and rhyming words with increasing vocabulary.
• An accountant, doctor, or mechanic are more proficient with words of their own respective fields.
• Vocabulary is increased with communication and more interaction. But styles may not be improved too much. Writing skills and styles are mostly intuitive.

Writers and Poets are gifted with the amazing skill of expressing their thoughts through prose or poetry. Some of them have typical styles of describing their scenes or characters.

Look at the following snippets from their books.

This snippet shows an enchanted flow of word power, each word starting with the letter "A" ---

"Ages ago, Alex, Allen, and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement.. anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation."-

Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa.

1)From Oliver Goldsmith (Canadian Poet), "The Rising Village"

Here crops of grain in rich luxuriance rise,

And wave their golden riches to the skies;

There smiling orchards interrupt the scene,

Or gardens bounded by some fence of green;

The farmer's cottage, bosomed 'mong the trees,

Whose spreading branches shelter from the breeze;

2) From Oliver Goldsmith (Original) - "The Deserted Village".

"Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned,

Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;

Where at each step the stranger fears to wake

The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;

Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey,

And savage men, more murderous still than they; "

3) William Wordsworth's "The Daffodils" -

"I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of, golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

4) From John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" -

"Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;"