The mere size of an author’s vocabulary is likely to tell us very little of value in assessing or understanding his work. Nevertheless, it is a statistic which has a perennial fascination. Scholars of the last generation repeatedly computed it for various authors, and their results are certain of incorporation into any student’s lecture notes. In fact, of course, precise comparative statistics are not usually available because the size of an author’s vocabulary depends essentially on the definition of ‘word’ adopted by the statistician. For example, do the three Chaucerian forms syngen, syngynge, and song represent three separate items of his vocabulary, or are they merely the differing grammatical representatives of a single item? A decision of this kind will, when repeated hundreds of times, greatly influence the final tally. Are proper nouns and variant spellings also to be included? Gower’s vocabulary, estimated at a remarkably precise 6006 items, falls drastically to 4648 when variants and proper names are excluded.1 Acknowledging such uncertainties, it has been estimated that Chaucer’s vocabulary is approximately twice that of Gower, that it equals that of the Authorised Version of the Bible, but is only one-third of that wielded by Shakespeare.2