Dean Farrar, a respected nineteenth-century intellectual, once eavesdropped on some apple-pickers: ‘I once listened for a long time to the conversation of three peasants who were gathering apples among the boughs of an orchard, and as far as I could conjecture, the whole number of words they used did not exceed a hundred’, he guessed. They managed with this low number, he suggested, because ‘the same coarse expletives recurred with a horrible frequency in the place of every single part of speech’. Dean Farrar, like numerous others, apparently grossly underestimated the number of words used and known by native speakers of English.

Words are the topic of this chapter. The language web is the title of this whole book, and the human wordstore with its multitude of links is perhaps the most truly weblike of all aspects of language – even though up till recently, both the size and importance of the internal dictionary, or mental lexicon, have been underestimated.