WordTips study finds Deakin University tops country in vocabulary, top four in world

The students with the biggest vocabularies in Australia have been found at Deakin University, new research reveals.

Journalism student Hannah Toohey says she has always enjoyed reading and writing, which she credits for her larger vocabulary. Picture: David Smith

Deakin journalism student Hannah Toohey says her generation may be known for a love of abbreviations, but believes having a wide vocab is still important.

And according to a new study Ms Toohey has nothing to worry about, with Deakin University students found to have larger vocabularies than their peers.

The study, from WordTips, looked at student newspapers from universities in Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to find out which students had widest vocabularies.

Researchers analysed the most recent articles produced by each publication.

They grouped the newspapers into universities, lemmatised their content – reducing words to their base form – and calculated the number of unique lemmas per 1000 words for each university.

Deakin came out on top in Australia with 414.9, and had the fourth highest score on the international scale.

This result indicates Deakin students contributing to student newspapers had more words at their disposal to keep their peers in the know than those at other Australian universities.

Hannah Toohey said she thought it was important especially for younger generations to expand their vocabularies. Picture: David Smith

MsToohey, who writes for student publication DScribe, credits her love of reading and writing for helping grow her vocabulary.

“The world is full of abbreviations now, but I think it’s so important for the younger generation to still have a good vocabulary and to be able to communicate well,” Ms Toohey said.

“I don’t actively do any exercises (to expand my vocabulary).

“I think it’s just something that comes naturally from reading.”

Bachelor of Communication teacher Alison McAdam said it was great for Deakin students to be recognised in the results.

“To be able to draw on lots of different words to express yourself and communicate (is important),” she said.

“Communication is such a vital part of our everyday lives, including our working lives, so for our students to be able to draw on lots of different words … is a real bonus.”

Ms Toohey said she thought it was impressive her university ranked so highly in the data, although the results weren’t surprising.

“I think it goes for a lot of different Victorian universities – they’ve all got bright students who are willing to learn and showcase what they know,” Ms Toohey said.

The other top Australian universities were University of Sydney and University of Wollongong with 409 and 405.2 unique words per 1000 respectively.

The University of St Andrews in Scotland in the UK was found to be the university where students had to biggest vocabulary, with 434.1 unique words per 1000.

For more information, visit word.tips/students-with-biggest-vocabularies/

Originally published as WordTips study finds Deakin University tops country in vocabulary, top four in world