The rising Latin vocabulary wall

New headwords a reader must add at each tier: DCC core 1000 → Cicero, Divinatio in Caecilium → MGH Libelli de Lite.

cumulative vocabulary≈ 6,489 headwordsto read all three

1 · Dickinson Latin Core

foundation · all eras

997

starting headwords

The 1000 most frequent Latin words. Covers ~85% of the running words in the Divinatio.

+then

2 · Divinatio in Caecilium

Cicero · 1st c. BCE · classical

+466

new beyond the core

One forensic speech — 5,818 words, 73 sections. Judicial vocabulary: accuso, quaestor, accusator.

+then

3 · Libelli de Lite

MGH · 11th–12th c. · medieval

+5,026

new beyond core + Divinatio

764-page, multi-author — ~378,000 words. Ecclesiastical lexicon: episcopus, ecclesia, papa, concilium, canon.

New headwords added at each tier

DCC core 997; Divinatio +466; Libelli de Lite +5,026.

Cumulative vocabulary you must know

997
+466
+5,026
DCC core · 997 + Divinatio · 1,463 + Libelli · ≈6,489

The Libelli jump is ~10× the Divinatio's — but front-loaded: about 30% of its 5,026 new words occur only once, while the top ~300 cover half of all new-word occurrences and the top ~1,000 cover ~77%. The active core is a few hundred ecclesiastical terms with a long rare tail.

Method & caveats. Lemmatised with the Latin-macronizer database (enclitic splitting, frequency disambiguation, proper-noun routing) and compared against the DCC Latin Core (997 headwords). Divinatio from clean Perseus XML (±5–10). The Libelli is noisy Internet Archive OCR in medieval orthography — read 5,026 as “on the order of 5,000 classical-recognisable headwords”; apparatus abbreviations, Roman numerals and medieval spellings (aecclesia=ecclesia) limit precision (~26% of OCR tokens unrecognised). Source: DCC Latin Core Vocabulary.