ot. buggs: That's a rare quality these days. There were teachers in grade school that talked of  "sentence sense" and "spelling sense." An early teacher advised that the best way to really know English is to study Latin. There are roughly 250,000 distinct words in English, not counting technical words. The French language, only 50,000 words. 65% of English words are derived from Latin through old Norman French (1066 William the Conqueror invades England) and church Latin. These include many of the abstract and more difficult words. Shakespeare knew about 67,000 words, The average American knows 10,000 and uses, on average, fewer than 2500 distinct words in ordinary speech or writing.