Homonym two or more words having the same spelling but different meanings

Research demonstrates that children learn most words indirectly, through reading, writing, listening, and talking (Stahl, 1986). By age six, most children have an oral vocabulary of up to 14,000 words (Clark, 1993). Nagy and Anderson (1984) concluded that high school graduates know 45,000 words. Until the age of 30, we learn about 3,500 new words a year, for a total of about 100,000 words (Gleitman, 1988). Johnson (2001) suggests that the fact that an individual's vocabulary may increase from 14,000 words at age six to 100,000 words as an adult means many words are learned through active language use rather than explicit instruction.