First Things First

As soon as a foreigner tries to master English, he runs up against the well-known anarchy of the vocabulary. A game, he learns, means a sport; but there are also game legs, big game, and being game to try. Draw is a common word: but there are drawing pictures, drawing water, drawing & quartering, and fighting to a draw. Fifteen years ago, big, black-haired Psychologist Irving Lorge of Columbia University's Teachers College decided to count the meanings of the most common English words, then try to determine which meanings a beginner should learn first.

At the time, he was working with Columbia's late Psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, who had done quite a bit of counting himself. By combing through thousands of pages of English, Thorndike had picked out the 10,000 words most frequently used. His Teacher's Word Book revolutionized the writing of English textbooks for children and foreigners. In one book for Spaniards, Thorndike and Lorge found, the author had included such rarities as caterpillar, snail, and cocoon in Lesson Five. In a text for Italians, wrench, bellows, tongs, and plumbline appeared on Page 10. One textbook started out waving the word wen.

A Year on G. Irving Lorge wanted to go beyond his work with Thorndike. "If we merely count words," said he, "we are not counting what is being communicated --the sense." He began his own counting, personally spent more than a year working on the letter G. Under his direction, 270 other scholars, who had landed on WPA projects during the depression, began doing the same for A to Z. They churned through such works as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Uncle Wiggily books, Malory's Morte d'Arthur and the Girl Scout Handbook. Last week, 15 years and 5,000,000 words later, the job was done.

No Bestseller. Concentrating on 570 of the most common words, Lorge found that the simplest ones usually have the largest number of meanings. A word like open, for instance, can mean uncovered (open boat), not closed (open door), unrestricted (open to use), forthright (open in manner), or not frozen (open soil). Even little by has 41 meanings.

The word with the most meanings (800) is run and its compounds (e.g., sheep run, home run, run on a bank). Put, make, pass, stand, work--all run to the hundreds. The most commonly used noun of all is man, but it has a mere 20 meanings. All in all, Lorge figured that his hard-working 570 words have 7,000 different uses.

Lorge admits that his Semantic Count of the 570 Commonest Words is a "scholar's enterprise" ("I don't expect to hit the bestseller lists"). So far, he has printed only 49 copies, but he hopes that these, planted in libraries throughout the U.S., will help dictionary and textbook writers to begin putting first things first.

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