The Power of Words

12 Sep, 2026

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the power of words.

It started a few years ago, when I read a book called Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain. The researchers followed 42 families from different socioeconomic backgrounds for two and a half years, trying to understand the differences in comprehension and cognitive development among their children.

What they found was striking.

The number of words a child hears—and, perhaps more importantly, the variety of those words—has a direct effect on their ability to comprehend the world as they grow older, as well as on their educational success.

By the age of four, the estimated number of words heard by children from different family backgrounds was:

The researchers argued that a significant part of the gap in educational achievement and cognitive development between children from welfare-receiving families and those from professional families could be traced back to this difference of roughly 30 million words.

I recently came across another idea that made this finding even more interesting to me:

The more words you have, the more of the world you can see.

A larger vocabulary does not merely give you more ways to describe things. It gives you more things to think about. It allows you to make finer distinctions, to recognize patterns, to name feelings, to formulate questions, and to connect ideas that might otherwise remain invisible to you.

In this sense, language does not simply express intelligence. It gives intelligence somewhere to go.

A person may be intelligent, but if their vocabulary is limited, that intelligence may have little room to reveal itself. Their thoughts can only travel as far as their language allows them to.

This gives us a different way of understanding Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous words:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

But if language can expand our world, the opposite is also true.

A loss of language can shrink it.

And the damage can be far more profound than simply having fewer words at your disposal. A person with a limited vocabulary may not even be able to recognize what is being taken from them—because understanding the loss itself requires words.

You need a word to name a feeling before you can fully examine it. You need a concept to recognize an idea. You need language to question what is happening to you.

Without those words, entire parts of reality can remain invisible.

This is perhaps why our current technological environment deserves more attention than we give it.

We live in an age where technology constantly feeds us cheap, frictionless, bite-sized information. A few seconds of scrolling can give us dozens of ideas, opinions, images, and fragments of knowledge. The flow is endless, and the cost of consuming it is almost zero.

But there is a hidden cost.

The world of short, effortless information leaves little room for the slow accumulation of language. Reading a difficult book demands something that scrolling does not: resistance.

You have to stay with a sentence you don't immediately understand. You have to encounter words you don't know. You have to follow an idea long after the novelty has disappeared. You have to build the vocabulary that allows your mind to make distinctions it could not make before.

Perhaps, then, reading is not simply a way of acquiring information.

It is a way of expanding the boundaries of reality itself.

And in a world increasingly designed to make information effortless, choosing to read deeply may be one of the quietest forms of resistance.

In Islam, the human being is described as ashraf al-makhlūqāt—the noblest of creation.

Among the things that distinguish human beings from the rest of creation, and perhaps even from the angels, is something remarkably simple: we were taught the names.

In the Qur’an, verses 30 to 33 of Surah Al-Baqarah tell the story in this order:

30 — ˹Remember˺ when your Lord said to the angels, “I am going to place a successive ˹human˺ authority on earth.” They asked ˹Allah˺, “Will You place in it someone who will spread corruption there and shed blood while we glorify Your praises and proclaim Your holiness?” Allah responded, “I know what you do not know.”

31 — He taught Adam the names of all things, then He presented them to the angels and said, “Tell Me the names of these, if what you say is true?”

32 — They replied, “Glory be to You! We have no knowledge except what You have taught us. You are truly the All-Knowing, All-Wise.”

33 — Allah said, “O Adam! Inform them of their names.” Then when Adam did, Allah said, “Did I not tell you that I know the secrets of the heavens and the earth, and I know what you reveal and what you conceal?”

There is something deeply mysterious about the connection between being human, remaining human, and having words.

Perhaps the story of Adam and the names is not merely a story about the acquisition of knowledge. Perhaps it is also a story about the unique relationship between language and consciousness.

To name something is to bring it into the realm of the knowable.

A feeling that has no name can remain an indistinct unease. An experience without language can pass through us without ever becoming fully understood. An idea for which we have no words may exist somewhere inside us, but remain inaccessible—even to ourselves.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons words matter so much.

They do not merely describe the world.

They allow us to perceive it.