The vocabulary of the English language as a system

Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogeneous. It consists of two layers - the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words. In fact native words comprise only 30 % of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.