Simple English Wikipedia

I had no idea there was such a thing as Simple English Wikipedia until I read about it in Research Buzz, nor did I know about Charles Ogden's principles of basic English , published in 1930. Ogden found that "if one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words." Those words are known as the BE850.