Good points all, belg4mit.

* If the sample is large enough, the correct percentage of archaic words will be in the sample, it'll work itself out.

* I had already removed proper nouns, nouns containing any uppercase letter. I should have noted that, but again I'm not sure it matters with a large enough sample.

* I'm not sure how words should really be counted, still looking for a reference myself. For my purpose, I am considering run, runs, ran, running as unique words.

I'm just looking for a ballpark number. It seems like a good ballpark to me that if the boy consistently knows 20-25% of the words in the sample, he should know 20-25% of the words in $DICT.

If anyone has pointers to real vocabulary development numbers and counting methods, I'd like to get'em.

YuckFoo