They say Shakespeare wrote over 30,000 unique words in his complete works and his vocabulary is estimated to be about twice that The average person today knows roughly 12,000 to 20,000 and only uses a tenth of that Thanks in part to the Internet, those numbers are fast becoming outdated English has always been composed of a mish-mash of different languages and other words, and now Paul Payack, who runs Global Language Monitor (GLM), estimates we are nearing the one millionth word in the English language Apparently Payack checks words that are "printed