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Basic English

noun

a simplified form of English restricted to an 850-word vocabulary and a few rules of grammar, intended especially as an international auxiliary language and for use in teaching English as a foreign language: devised by Charles Kay Ogden.

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Origin:
1925–30

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To Basic English

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Basic English is always a great word to know.

So is callithumpian. Does it mean:

a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.

a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

basic English

—n
	a simplified form of English, proposed by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, containing a vocabulary of approximately 850 of the commonest English words, intended as an international language

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Word Dynamo Rating For Basic English

People who can define Basic English may know 45,520 words, as many as a 12th grader.

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Matching Quote

"The differences between the President and the Prime Minister were at least in one respect something more than the obvious differences of national character, education, and even temperament. For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow—despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century."

-Isaiah Berlin

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