AVReading Newsletter October: Vocabulary Collapse

  

I have found this year’s class of ninth graders to be beguiling, a term that expresses my intrigue and amusement around their collective personality and demeanor.  Of course, beguiling is not a word we typically use in our daily vocabulary, and in all fairness, it really hasn’t been widely used in books since the early 19th century (according to Google’s Ngram Viewer).  Not sure I would typically use it in front of a class, either.  Nonetheless, it’s a fun word.  It works better than other words like interesting, fun, or entertaining.  There is perhaps a sense of magic to the word, as if you are being enchanted.  

            I make this point to highlight the growing concern related to our collective shrinking vocabulary, a thesis that one of my orators is exploring this year.  Here are some of the things she has found.  First, we are using fewer words than previous generations.  Consider the a 2026 survey indicating that the average person is simply using 338 fewer words a day than a decade ago.  Extending this out, it means we are using 120,000 fewer words a year.  And over the course of the fifteen year study, it would have meant a difference of one million words.  It’s probably no surprise that the demographic hardest hit would be our young people under the age of 25, who showed a 28% decrease in word usage (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2026).  

            Young children have also shown a decrease.  An Oxford University study from 2023 showed that two in five children now have fallen behind in vocabulary development.  A gap that historically has been hard to close once children reach second grade. And of course, we are reading less as a whole.  Since 2004, we’ve seen an eight percent decrease (28-16 percent) in the number of people who read for enjoyment.  As a 2026 Time Use Survey of 230,000 people indicates, gambling has now become a more common event than reading for enjoyment.  This is significant when it comes to vocabulary development.  Next to verbal engagement, reading is perhaps the most important means of building a language base.  

            Compounding the problem are recent trends in AI.  Specifically, the trend is for college students is to download the pdf of assigned readings into AI, so that AI can shorten the length and reduce the reading level of the texts-- thus there is a “levelling off language”.  The highs and lows and nuances of language disappear.  Consider the book How  Democracies Die by Harvard professors Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.  AI would do a fine job of offering bullet points related to the main ideas of the text.  However, you would likely miss some of the finer points, like that of forbearance.  Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that forbearance is a unique feature of democracies-- a trait by which leaders decide to forego the exercise of power or opportunity, in order to protect larger principles or ideals.  Now imagine how this plays out across many other readings, posts, and online engagements.  Opportunities where the word forbearance just seems to disappear.  Along with it, we might ultimately lose the actual idea of it altogether.  We are left to consider a world where diplomacy, self control, and restraint are no longer options.  

            Among the many benefits of reading-- especially reading long form, diverse texts-- is a rich vocabulary development.  It’s another amazing byproduct of reading-- this wonderful thing you can do for enjoyment or even self-improvement.  Reading widely and often isn’t just about exposing yourself to new ideas, new perspectives, new cultures, and new ways of being, it expands your reality by growing the words you can now use to describe it.  If nothing else, it can be the means by which we empower citizens with the tools of language and thought. 

Here are some ways to promote reading within your classes: 

Pick up a book (if you haven’t done so lately).  To paraphrase Gandhi, you have to be the change you hope to see.  Before we can promote the value, power, and beauty of reading, we could probably do a little more of it ourselves.  For the voracious reader out there, the challenge is to find books in domains that are new to you.  It puts you in mental spaces closer to that of your students who have to pick up books or texts in domains that are completely new to them.  

Talk about your books with classes.  Find a way to share your recent reading list with students.  Bookish people could do a little more to increase the visibility of reading.  

Play with Words.  Over the year, I’ll offer a number of word study ideas and opportunities that you might consider using in class.  Many of them are simply word plays to help students grow their vocabularies. . . and their worlds.  

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