78 Quotes About Vocabulary

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. James D. Nicoll

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. Unknown

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Stephen King

How many words are you having trouble with, sir?"" Just the ones that I've highlighted."" I count at least a dozen, and I haven't gotten out of the first paragraph."" That's as far as I got, too. I'm not sure you and I speak the same language. Howard Tayler

He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it. Frank Herbert

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up. For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari. Charles Harrington Elster

A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one. J.r.r. Tolkien

Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying. Catherynne M. Valente

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words. Roy Peter Clark

This document outlines our plan to perpetrate insurance fraud, insider trading, and character assassination....hopefully tripling our paycheck on this job. Okay, see? Those words I understand just fine. Use them more often.- Lieutenant Massey Reynstein & Captain Tagon Howard Tayler

I understand the gist of your speculation, ' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory. Jack Vance

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana. Madeleine LEngle

I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse. Woody Allen

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word. Carl Sagan

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing. Henry Hazlitt

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them. Abigail Adams

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account. John Dewey

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. Alberto Manguel

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary. Ari Marmell

I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound. Sally Gardner

I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: Words are a motherfucker. Jillian Keenan

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldn’t find the apposite word, if you found your language slipping into the mire of vagueness and obscurity, this meant that you needed to work on your vocabulary. Because the apposite word certainly existed — and it was very eager to make your acquaintance. Gavin Extence

I will not impress you with words, I will prove to you their definition. It’s a genuine vocabulary. Soar

By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension. Ben Carson

It is our duty and our joy to communicate our hearts to each other. Words assist us in this task. Kate Dicamillo

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe. Unknown

My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary. Margaret Edson

The more words you know, the more clearly and powerfully you will think...and the more ideas you will invite into your mind. Wilfred Funk

Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary. Tim Gunn

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary. J.k. Rowling

With my sometimes blunt indecent vocabulary & very vivid imagination, I wonder if I should be writing "other" kinds of content. April Mae Monterrosa

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. Milan Kundera

The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Stephen King

Stephen King is a powerful guy, will powerful vocabulary. Deyth Banger

Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment, ” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out, ” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration. G.k. Chesterton

Here's my using dickwad in a sentence. Greg is such a dickwad, he locks his car in the Pagoda Pizza parking lot. (No. That isn't a real Vocab word.) A.S. King

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too. Chris Gardner

As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses! Sheri S. Tepper

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing. Diane Ackerman

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this. Unknown

We live at the level of our language. Ellen Gilchrist

The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop. T. Geronimo Johnson

Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60, 000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100 words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4000 words account for 98% of conversation. David Miller

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis. Joseph Brodsky

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary — I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does. Anis Mojgani

Lincoln bought a German language newspaper. Harold Holzer

There are two words that I believe could be completely eradicated from our vocabulary — “I can’t.” These two words are so definite that they leave absolutely no room for hope. Instead, I suggest we use the phrase, “How can I? Daniel Willey

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker. Rebecca Goldstein

PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary. Anthony T. Hincks

All conversation, big or small, is about painting word pictures of your experiences for other people. The more Nicholas Boothman

So much of what we read and write these days is disposable. John Kasich

When Internet parlance finds its way into our accepted vocabulary, it becomes a cliché. Paul Babicki

Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction. Ron Suskind

Right! ""Right! ""You can get there! "" I can get there! "" You're a natural at counting to two! "" I'm a nat'ral at counting to two! "" If you can count to two, you can count to anything! "" If I can count to two, I can count to anything! "" And then the world is your mollusc! "" My mollusc! What's a mollusc? Terry Pratchett

Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life. Craig D. Lounsbrough

He was telling an interesting anecdote full of exciting words like "encyclopedia" and "rhododendron". A.a. Milne

In God’s vocabulary, ‘lost’ is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective ‘found’ if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser. Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I had been born in the 1700′s, presumably children had a bigger vocabulary than I had which means I wouldn’t have been able to recite fairy tales to kids because I’m not smart enough. You know…? I’d have to be like….uh: In time passed, though not long ago, there lived three pigs in stature, little in number, three, who being of an age both entitled and inspired to seek their fortune did set about to do thusly. When they had traveled a distance, pig numbered first spake saying, “Harken Brethren, head this impetuous realm! Tarry me far from hearth and home I fear we shall fair *snort* not well! ” And so being collectively agreed, but individually impaled, the diminutive swine sought each to erect himself an abode... John Branyan

He shook his head, ' Fuck, you say such fucking weird things.'' Is that still your favourite word?' asked Isola interestedly, 'I like "verisimilitude". Tolkein said the most beautiful English phrase is "cellar door", Allyse Near

Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it. Davis Miller

This year my goal will be to learn new vocabulary in English and to read as much as possible books. Deyth Banger

She took a moment to lament her lack of parasol. Every time she left the house, she felt keenly the absence of her heretofore ubiquitous accessory. Gail Carriger

We’re sick of hearing people say, “That band is so gay, ” or “Those guys are fags.” Gay is not a synonym for shitty. If you wanna say something’s shitty, say it’s shitty. Stop being such homophobic assholes. Pete Wentz

Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist. Eleanor Roosevelt

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words. Alexis De Tocqueville

Lethargy. It's a word I know, because it's in one of my father's favorite expressions. Lethargy breeds lethargy. It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you want to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf. Neal Shusterman

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do. Mark Twain

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday. John McWhorter

Sound is the vocabulary of nature. Pierre Schaeffer

Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house. Bjarke Ingels