How much vocabulary to read the Libelli de Lite

Each headword you learn (most frequent first) raises the share of running text you understand. Reading research: ~95% coverage = good comprehension, ~98% = comfortable independent reading.

90% understood · gist, dictionary for the rest

~1,180

headwords — about 540 new beyond the DCC core 1000

95% understood · good level of understanding

~2,000

headwords — about 1,250 new beyond the DCC core 1000

98% understood · comfortable, near-independent

~3,280

headwords — about 2,420 new beyond the DCC core 1000

Coverage curve — headwords known vs % of text understood

Coverage rises steeply: ~520 headwords = 80%, ~2,000 = 95%, ~3,280 = 98%.

Method & caveats. Curve built from the lemmatised Libelli de Lite (~378,000 words); proper names counted as known. Denominator is the 74% of tokens recognised by the classical lemmatiser — the unrecognised 26% is mostly apparatus abbreviations, Roman numerals, OCR errors and medieval spellings (aecclesia=ecclesia), so figures are estimates (±~10%). "New beyond core" assumes a reader who already controls the DCC Latin Core 1000.