How fast does vocabulary grow, and how long does 1,000 words take?
People often ask how long it takes to reach a certain number of words. There's no single answer, because it depends on how much time you put in and what you do with it. But there are some useful rules of thumb, and one thing that surprises most learners: growth slows down as you go, and that's normal.
How native speakers grow
Children learn words remarkably fast. During their school years they add thousands of words a year, mostly from reading and conversation rather than from lessons.
Adults keep going, just more slowly. According to the study we looked at in How many words does a native English speaker know?, people learn about 6,000 more words between the ages of 20 and 60. That's roughly one new word every two days, without really trying.
Why it slows down
The reason is how often words appear. The most common words turn up on every page. A word around the 10,000th most common might not appear even once in a whole novel.
Since a word usually needs to be met many times before it sticks, the common ones get learned almost by themselves. The rarer ones only come with a lot of reading, or with deliberate study. That's why the first few thousand words come quickly and each thousand after that takes longer.
There's a second reason it feels slow. Each new thousand words covers less of what you read and hear. Going from 1,000 to 2,000 words makes a huge difference to what you understand. Going from 9,000 to 10,000 is just as much work but you notice it far less, even though you're learning at the same pace.
How long does 1,000 words take?
With deliberate study, ten new words a day is realistic for most people, as long as they're reviewed with spaced repetition. In theory that makes 1,000 words in a hundred days. In practice reviews take time, and some words don't stick the first time, so three to four months at about fifteen to twenty minutes a day is a fair estimate.
You can push it to twenty a day, but the reviews build up quickly, and many people give up because of it. Slow and steady usually gets further.
Reading is harder to put a number on. At the right level, each book or long article teaches you a handful of new words and strengthens many more that you half know. It's slower per hour than flashcards for brand-new words, but it's what turns them into words you really know. Doing both works best.
Measuring your progress
Because growth is gradual, testing yourself every week won't show much. Every few months is better. Keep in mind that any vocabulary test, ours included, gives an estimate, so a difference of a few hundred words between two results doesn't mean much on its own. Look at the trend over several tests instead.
