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The next 1000 words

The Next Thousand Words

Why should a dictionary be arranged alphabetically?

Why not arrange them in the order of most commonly used on down?

Why can we not organize dictionary to progressively improve an individual's knowledge of the words (meaning, usage)?

In the print world, it made sense to organize words in a sorted order so that it is easy to look up a word.

In the digital world, it is trivial to organize words in any order.

Users of a language are often assigned numbers like this -- middle school educated level, university level, (maybe) professor of lingustics level etc.

By collecting the (next) most popular 1000 words, and providing them in "hyperlinked" format where one can do the following

  1. learn most popular down
  2. random
  3. related word (links)
  4. spaced repetition (the app/website remembers what you studied)

This can be a good technique to bring up learners of a language to learn a new language.

This idea idea came to me in the shower, when I was thinking about how do I improve my English vocabulary beyond the current 50,000 words [1] I might already know. The second (possibly latent) inspiration is the upgoer five text editor [2], via [3]

References

[1] https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-person-know first google result for "how many words does an average person know".

[2] https://splasho.com/upgoer5/

[3] https://twitter.com/vikasgorur/status/1564165289318555648

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