Other Investigations
In 1911 Mr. R. C. Eldridge published the results of a study of 250 different newspaper articles occurring in four issues of a Buffalo Sunday paper. Of the 43,098 words tabulated there were only 6,002 different words. This again shows that the writing vocabulary even of adults is comparatively small.
Cook and O’Shea studied the correspondence of thirteen adults, tabulating 200,000 words, and found only 5,200 different words.
There is one underlying characteristic of each of these three studies; viz., the writing, and therefore the spelling, vocabulary of individuals is much smaller than we formerly considered it, and consists of approximately 5,000 words. (The Aldine vocabulary contains approximately 5,000 carefully selected words which should form the basis of the writing vocabulary of an eighth grade pupil.)