I recently played a game of scrabble with friends and managed to get the word Segue. No one knew what it meant and they were teetering on challenging me and finally did. It got me thinking about one’s passive vocabulary.
Passive vocabulary are the words one probably never or very rarely uses, but one knows and recognises when one comes across them. In English this is enhanced by knowing the Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes so even if a word is new one can hazard a guess at half its meaning. Not that that would help in scrabble. One’s active vocabulary are the words one uses all the time. Simenon, who wrote the Maigret crime novels, said a Frenchman’s active vocabulary was 6,000 words. He worked out what they were and never sued any other set of words.
Segue – seamless transition in music, film or writing.
#scrabble
#boardgame