Here’s how NJ’s vocabulary compares to the rest of the country

According to the University of Maryland, the average U.S. adult speaks between 7,000 and 20,000 words per day. A study by Ghent University found that the average English-speaking American will know at least 42,000 words by adulthood.

New Jersey is a pretty unique state with a pretty unique patois, so you would think we have a larger-than-average vocabulary, but it turns out, no.

Letter Solver analyzed millions of geotagged English-language tweets, and condensed the data into a sample of 1,000 common words. Crunching the numbers on how many unique words were used by each city per 1,000, they were able to come up with a list of who uses the most unique words.

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📚 Hawaii is the state with the biggest vocabulary, with Twitter users including 466 unique words per 1,000.

📚 Maryland is the state with the lowest vocabulary, at 432.7/1,000 unique words.

📚 San Francisco is the big city with the biggest vocabulary (477.1 unique words).

📚 The city with the smallest vocabulary is Baltimore (423 unique words).

All right, now we know what the upper and lower limits of the scores are, so where does New Jersey fit in? Not as high as Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Alabama, and a bunch of others.

New Jersey’s average unique words used was 448 (the national average is 453). It kind of hurts to finish behind some of those states (as well as behind Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and both Carolinas).

Apparently, the most articulate citizens are in San Mateo, California, with an average number of unique words at 484.2.

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Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Bill Doyle only.

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