This concerns the fact that a user may be able to use a word as a verb and as a noun. Additionally, the ability to rephrase sentences in active or passive form makes it easy to use. For example, the active form "I kicked the ball" can easily be transformed into the passive equivalent "The ball was kicked". English is a rich language also because it has a highly developed vocabulary. This richness makes it much more developed than other languages. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary revised in 1989 contains approximately 615,000 words in 20 volumes (The History of English 4). This makes it the largest dictionary in the world. Technical and scientific words are excluded from this volume, as they would have made the dictionary longer. Even then, the language continues to grow every year, with evidence suggesting that the English lexicon increases annually at the rate of 8500 per year. Furthermore, the availability of a large number of synonyms allows for a variety of distinctions, which are never available anywhere else