[Sidenote: Great number.]

The first essential, then, is to know the extent and nature of
the mischief; and this can only be accomplished by setting out the
homophones in a table before the eye. The list below is taken from
a 'pronouncing dictionary' which professes not to deal with obsolete
words, and it gives over 800 ambiguous sounds; so that, since
these must be at least doublets, and many of them are triplets or
quadruplets, we must have something between 1,600 and 2,000 words of
ambiguous meaning in our ordinary vocabulary.[4]

[Footnote 4: In Skeat's _Etymological Dictionary_ there is a list of
_homonyms_, that is words which are ambiguous to the eye by similar
spellings, as homophones are to the ear by similar sounds: and that
list, which includes obsolete words, has 1,600 items. 1,600 is the
number of homophones which our list would show if they were all only
doublets.]

Now it is variously estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 words is about the
limit of an average educated man's talking vocabulary, and since the
1,600 are, the most of them, words which such a speaker will use
(the reader can judge for himself) it follows that he has a foolishly
imperfect and clumsy instrument.

As to what proportion 1,700 (say) may be to the full vocabulary of the
language--it is difficult to estimate this because the dictionaries
vary so much. The word _homophone_ is not recognized by Johnson or
by Richardson: Johnson under _homo-_ has six derivatives of Herbert
Spencer's favourite word _homogeneous_, but beside these only four
other words with this Greek affix. Richardson's dictionary has an even