Linguistics
One linguist tried to shrink the entire English language down to 850 words
In 1930, Charles Kay Ogden proposed 'Basic English' — a stripped-down subset of just 850 words, using only 18 verbs, that he claimed could express nearly anything expressible in full English through clever combination. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt both took a public interest in it during WWII as a possible international auxiliary language. It never caught on widely, but it directly influenced later 'controlled English' systems still used today to write clear technical documentation.