A way of seeing the variety of language

You've found from your searches that there are between half a million and a million words in the English language, yet most of us have a working vocabulary of 20,000-30,000, and of those, we use maybe 2,000 on a daily basis.

So this raises two questions: 1) Where do all those words come from? and 2) how on Earth do we manage to communicate with each other?

Here's an image that may help. It's called a "fractal." The small parts are the same shape as the large parts. Another way of saying it is the large parts are made up of smaller copies of themselves. Another way of saying it is it is infinitely recursive, and scale-independent.

Anyway, look at the central light green portion. At the very center is a little snowflake - that's your daily vocabulary. The light green section as a whole is your working vocabulary of 20,000-30,000 words. Beyond that are areas of specialization. Once you get out to the edges, very few people share that vocabulary. To translate something from the red to the blue, you have to trace a line back down to the light green, then back out. No one person knows everything.

It might be easier for red to understand blue than to understand purple, which traces a very different path out to the edges.

Hope this helps.