Words by Wardo

Interstitial

[/in-tuhr-STISH-uhl/] adjective

1. Of, forming, or occupying interstices (usually a very small space between things)

Seen in

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

"The stairwells between the floors are densely hung with interstitial pieces, drawings and small paintings, studies and experimentations, that JB made between bodies of work."

It's an interesting fact that

The Pareto Principle

, where a small subset of elements have an outsized effect, also applies to language use; the bulk of our communication is done using a small subset of the language.

While English has an estimated 171,146 words currently in use (aside from over 47 thousand obsolete words), native speakers typically only know about 15 to 20 thousand

word families/lemmas

. Research has shown, however, that learning just the top 800 most frequent lemmas in English will allow you to understand 75% of the language as its spoken in everyday life!

To understand dialogue in movies and shows? You'll need ~3,000 lemmas.

To understand any written content (novels, articles, newspapers)? You'll need ~8,000-9,000 lemmas. Still, the vast majority of the language is never touched in everyday conversation.

"Core words", as they're called, make up the vast majority of spoken and written content in any language; in English, it includes words like "the", "and", "to", and "of". The remaining are words that add meaning and intention to the sentence. These are the words less often used daily, but core for understanding English language as a whole.

While core words serve as the glue holding sentences together, it's the less frequent, more nuanced words that infuse language with depth and color. These words, though rarely present in our daily vocabulary, enhance our conversations and writing, enriching them with subtlety and complexity.

The word "interstitial" itself exemplifies this beautifully, hence why it was chosen as the first word to start this project. Originating from scientific texts in the 1640s, it describes the small spaces or intervals between structures; in a broader context related to language, it metaphorically highlights the gaps in our communication that we fill in with these meaningful lexical choices. This website and the words it explores are dedicated to just that - uncovering and celebrating these linguistic gems.

By focusing on words that are interstitial to everyday communication, my goal is to illuminate how they contribute to making English a rich and evocative language, demonstrating that the beauty of speech often lies in the spaces between.