Here is a list of vocabulary a year 4 student got sent home to match with definitions. We put the words into the 14-billion-word iWeb corpus to check the ranking of how common the words are against themselves. Note that the number to the right is how many occurrences of the word exist in the corpus.
1 PREDICT 202627
2 CARGO 173340
3 FATAL 156661
4 RETRIEVE 121759
5 SQUAT 73910
6 HAVOC 54293
7 PINNACLE 49561
8 PASTURE 44003
9 GULP 15354
10 SURLY 9367
11 TEPID 9154
12 LOAM 6143
13 WRANGLE 5387
14 LACERATE 712
If we look at where the word ‘lacerate’ appears in the ranking of all the English words, we can see a person should have an active vocabulary of around 47K+ words.
Unashamedly, I had to google what ‘loam’ is.
According to google:
a fertile soil of clay and sand containing humus.
I must have a small vocabulary not to know what ‘loam’ means. Suddenly, I realise I must learn more to keep up with my child. NOT.
As an English teacher, I have never needed to know what that word means and wonder why my kid should be learning it in grade 4. Hopefully, it exists in some text they need to understand.