First 50 Words: What to Expect, and When

Before anything else, the caveat that matters most, because the rest of this article is a description and not a yardstick.

Ranges in early language vary enormously between children, and the variation is almost all normal. Two children who end up equally articulate at six can be a year apart at eighteen months. Nothing below is a checklist, a diagnostic, or a reason to worry. If you have a concern about your child’s hearing, speech or development — at any age, for any reason, including a reason you cannot quite articulate — a health visitor, GP or paediatrician is the right person to ask, and asking early is never the wrong call. They can assess your actual child, which no article can.

With that said: the first 50 words are one of the strangest and most enjoyable things to watch happen, and knowing roughly what to expect makes it much easier to notice while it is going on.

“First word” is a much blurrier moment than anyone admits

Everybody asks what the first word was. Almost nobody can honestly answer.

The problem is that language does not switch on. It fades up. Long before there are words there is babble with the shape of speech in it — the rise and fall of a question, the rhythm of a complaint. Then there are sounds attached to situations: a particular noise that reliably means the cat, which is not quite a word but is definitely not nothing. Then there is a sound that resembles a word, used correctly once, and then not again for three weeks.

So the honest answer to “what was her first word” is usually “there was a fortnight in which something happened”. Parents pick a winner retrospectively, and the winner is normally whichever one had a witness. This is worth knowing, because it takes the pressure off recording the first word and puts it where it belongs: on catching the words as they arrive, dated, without worrying about which one was officially first.

Common early candidates, for what it is worth: the people and animals in the house, the words for wanting things, and the words for things that vanish and come back — which is why “gone”, “more” and “again” show up so early and so often.

The rough shape of the first fifty

Across many children, the first fifty words tend to cluster in a few categories rather than being an even spread of the language.

People and animals. Caregivers first, usually, then siblings, then the dog. Animals are wildly over-represented in early vocabulary relative to how often toddlers meet animals, mostly because books and toys are full of them.

Food. Specific and motivated. Banana does a lot of heavy lifting.

Things that move or make noise. Cars, buses, phones, the hoover. Noise gets attention and attention gets named.

Social words. Hiya, bye, please, uh-oh, no. These often arrive earlier than people expect because they are whole social moves rather than labels, and toddlers are extremely motivated to make social moves.

Words for wanting and refusing. More, again, up, mine, no. This group is the one that changes daily life, because it is the beginning of a child being able to tell you a thing instead of crying about it.

Verbs and describing words generally come later than nouns, though not in every language and not in every child. And a good number of early words are not words in the dictionary sense at all — they are the family’s own: a made-up sound for the pushchair, a mangled version of a sibling’s name that everyone in the house now uses in earnest.

Timing, held loosely: many children reach around fifty words somewhere in the second half of the second year, and the spread around that is very wide in both directions. Some children say almost nothing until eighteen months and then appear to have been listening the entire time. That pattern is common and is not, by itself, a warning sign.

The explosion around eighteen months

At some point, often somewhere near fifty words, the rate changes. It stops feeling like a word every week or two and starts feeling like several a day. It is startling if you are not expecting it.

The change is usually less sudden than it feels. What seems to be happening is that a child works out that things have names — that naming is a general property of the world rather than a set of individual facts to be learned one at a time. After that, every new object is a question waiting to be asked, and the rate is limited mainly by how many new objects they meet.

The practical consequence for anyone hoping to keep a record: this is exactly the point at which keeping a record becomes impossible if you are relying on memory. Up to fifty, you can more or less hold them in your head. After the explosion you cannot, and the words arriving then are some of the best ones, because the mispronunciations get more elaborate as the words get longer.

Why parents forget them

Ask a parent of a seven-year-old what their child called a helicopter at two. Most will remember that there was a word, and that it was very funny, and that they said at the time they would never forget it.

Two things conspire. The words arrive faster than memory keeps up, particularly during a period of your life with very little sleep in it. And the wrong versions are corrected out of existence within weeks — the child says it properly, everyone adopts the correct form, and the old one is gone so completely that even hearing it again does not always bring it back.

What survives, if nothing is written down, is a vague warm sense that they used to say things funny. What is lost is the actual words, which are the specific, retrievable, quotable things you would want. “She mispronounced everything” is not a memory. “She called the vacuum cleaner the roaring” is.

How to catch them

The method is not sophisticated, and its only real requirement is that it happens the same day.

Write it down within a few hours. Not that evening if you can help it, and certainly not at the weekend. The exact form degrades fast.

Keep the wrong version, verbatim. This is the whole thing. Write “sketti”, not “spaghetti”. Write “nana” and note whether it meant banana or grandmother, because in six years you will not be able to reconstruct it. The correct pronunciation is not a memory — every adult says it that way. The error is the memory.

Date it. A word without a date is an anecdote. A word with a date sits in a sequence, and the sequence is what becomes interesting later: the fortnight where everything was “dat”, the month where every animal was a dog.

Write down what it was for, if it is not obvious. Family words in particular are meaningless in three years without a note. “Bobbin — the blue blanket” takes four seconds.

Keep them in one place, in order. Notes scattered across a phone, a WhatsApp message to your partner and the back of an envelope are, collectively, not a record. This is the part DearBaby’s First 50 Words does for us, and any method with the same three properties — same-day, dated, all in one place — works just as well.

The same habit is worth applying to the sound of the words, not only the list of them — recording your child’s voice once a month is the companion piece to this one.

You will end up with something that is a genuinely odd pleasure to read: fifty entries, in order, with dates, most of them wrong, all of them theirs. It takes a few seconds at a time and it is the only version of this that survives, because the alternative is remembering, and remembering does not work.