Children typically begin to understand a few words in their first year of life and utter their first words around their first birthday, as we saw in the last chapter. From there, they’ll typically acquire a few words per month until sometime around eighteen months (give or take six months), when their vocabularies begin to explode in a “word spurt.” By the time they start school, their vocabulary will have ballooned to something like 10,000 words, and by college, it will be five times larger.
