- As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied.
Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious word) was characterized as intermediate but I think it's much more obscure and less obvious than that; Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was used as a word (I got that wrong as well) - any type of 'phobia' word is really the sort of thing a fourth grader opens up a page in the dictionary and points out, not a word that is used... ever; metamorphosis and kinetic were labeled expert, which I don't agree with (what elementary schooler doesn't learn about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly? what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?).
Most words were reasonably well defined in a way that most people would understand or recognize. A few words had poor definitions: lethargy ("the state of being lethargic" - obvious); complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug); magnanimous ("generous toward a rival" - I disagree that a rival must be involved); gauche ("socially awkward" - this is sort of close but the given definition completely misses the idea of being tactless).
They call it scientific and give a hand-wavey formula, but they don't explain how words are stratified in the first place. If stratified sampling is a formally recognized method of doing this, it would be nice to have a link to a real reference. I think I know a lot of words, but I am skeptical of the estimate this app provided (north of 75k).
- I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good.
Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: it's not that you're expected to know the whole word, but they're looking for you to recognize components of it and infer the meaning from that. I knew sesquippedalian (sometimes jokingly used in "long word" contexts) so that was easy: but phobia is also easily identifiable, and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome). So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.
Complacent and gauche: have heard both these uses, I think that's straightforwardly correct. If this was a dictionary that would, at worst, be the 2nd or 3rd definition. No complaints.
Source: I used to place in spelling bees and could've been a contender but I didn't have the discipline to study the dictionary for hours on the weekends, which is the next level.
- I will say that breviary it showed up in "advanced" for me, and was one of only two words below "grandmaster" I missed. In the modern era it is jargon, it's just that the in group (practitioners of liturgical Christianity) are in the ballpark of a quarter of the English speaking world.
I'll remark that "if you have interest in [some particular academic pursuit], you'd likely know it" is a pretty decent description of the sort of word that shows up in "grandmaster" tier.
(I have joked that, living in Japan, my English is getting worse faster than my Japanese is getting better, but breviary might well be a concrete example.)
- To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia
- Yes. It is a word which seems to only be used as an example of a long and obscure word. I have never heard it used expressively, other than as a joke.
- Yes, breviary is the only word in the first 80 that I hadn't ever seen before but I understand that if you're Catholic it's probably not that much weirder than "rosary" or "Eucharist" or whatever which are words I did know, so fine.
In the last batch there were a few words that I was vaguely confident of but a lot more of them seemed like "stunt" words I would never see because every time they'd need defining so why bother.
Also I was assuming it was picking from a huge set, but it seems everybody was shown the same words, so while it's supposedly a "sample" any bias, even if unintended, shows up in the results, if you wanted to be scientific perhaps you'd do this for 1000 words and then sample 100 questions from that for each participant or something.
- In many books from 1800s the priest is always described having his breviary at hand. It's also often featured when priests appear in jokes.
- > and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome)
Well.. Hippos is greek for horse, and Hippopotamus is a "river horse". Same for Hippodrome, a course for horses. And in latin, hypo means small (and not large), as seen in e.g. hypoglycemia.
- And I thought in German Nilpferd (horse from the Nile) sounded ridiculous. It is almost the same as the original. TIL
- Hypo is Greek too, not Latin "small" for a latin radical would be "mini" (from "minus") like in miniature, minuscule, etc.
- > So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.
Except "hippo-" is from Greek and means "horse".
- For explicit comparison: kinetic and metamorphosis are ~10x as common as breviary, and 10,000x as common as hippo….
See NGRAMs: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHip...
- Yeh, it had 'kerfuffle' as one of the last words but that's very common. Yet it had Zenzizenzizenzic (which I'd never heard of but I think I guessed it right)
It really could do with a summary showing the answers you made and corrections for what you got wrong.
- Ha, a Wikipedia article link to Zenzizenzizenzic was on HN earlier today! I don't think I would have gotten that one right otherwise.
- > complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug)
I agree that it doesn't seem 'smug', but weirdly both dictionary dot com and Wiktionary give 'smug' as a synonym or part of the definition.
But they also analyze 'smug' as equivalent to self-satisfied or self-complacent, so maybe that's the word whose meaning is not as expected.
(I would think of "smug" less as "self-" anything - it implies a relation, it's more like exulting in a superior situation one has over someone. And 'complacent' is at base being content with one's situation, but often with the negative implication that one should be acting to make things better instead)
- In my mind "complacent" means the opposite of "pro-active" - not taking actions or decisions in the face of an issue. That could be because of feeling panicked or uncertain. So I was also surprised by the "smug" and "self-satisfied" parts.
- I don’t get the smug. But complacent has always has the “self-satisfied” and “a bit lazy”. Not exactly what is in your comment, but someone that is rooted in his behavior, but not for stubbornness or arrogance, just “it is ok that way because I’m happy and there’s no reason to change”
- The test hardly seems adaptive (if at all) and yet it made the HN front page. That’s impressive.
- Of the words people are commenting on here, I only remembered one of that (maybe that's just because I got it wrong), zenzizenzizenzic. I guess if I'd realised zenzi was relating to squaring, I might have guessed it.
I think some of the, were flawed - I can't remember what it was now, but one word two of the meanings were kind of appropriate, but I chose the wrong one, and I think there were 2-3 words I didn't know but guessed from the components in the words. At least one I also guessed that way, but got the complete opposite meaning!
I like this kind of test, but for me, the first 2 sections (which I aced) were kind of redundant. Maybe they needed to stratify it more or do it more dynamically, e.g. maybe do half the layer 1 questions, and if you get all them correct, move on to half the layer 2 questions. If you get one wrong, you get the rest of the layer 2 questions, and maybe if you get more than a certain number of those wrong you also have to go back and do the rest of layer 1. If you ace the first half of layer 2 as well as layer 1, maybe you jump straight into layer 3, etc...
- If you didn't already know what Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was, it's very easy to guess from four options.
I agree there were too many clicks per word, I took me too long to finish. But I also found it too easy to guess the few words I did not know
- In particular, I got a bunch of guesses correct because there's a pattern that several options are often related to each other, and either only one is different, (e.g., "Do good", "Do bad", "Be evil") -- in which case the answer is obvious -- or at least there's a contrasting pair which narrows it down to a 50% chance.
- Does the ability to guess the meaning of a word (from four options or context) is the same as knowing the word and using it in your speech?
- It is not. Vocabulary is far from the binary of "you know this word or you don't". At a minimum, it is usually split into passive and active vocabulary, with passive being the words you understand when encountered, and active being the words you can use effectively. Wikipedia's entry is a pretty good overview.
- It is more like an ability to recognize the word when it is used in context.
I got ~1/3 that is very generous estimate even for "recall" case (recognize), and it obviously false for the "generate" case (using in speech) where I guess my vocabulary is likely ~1/90 of all English words.
- No, absolutely not, and that's my point. A real test would be having to type the definition, or pick from ten options
- I think that picking the correct (or most correct, which is trickier) use of the word in context (out of, as you say, many options) might be a good way to test for receptive vocabulary.
- > what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?
95% of Americans.
- Sick burn bro.
I can assure you that just about every American that has made it through middle school has been taught about kinetic energy. Let alone high school.
- Being taught something has little correlation with learning it, and even less with remembering it years later.
Perhaps just because it suits my learning style, I find learning is actually easier if I attempt to work something out or guess it, and then am corrected when wrong, because then I have a memory to anchor it on. If I skip that part and just try to learn some facts, very little is retained. One consequence of this is that I prefer science / logic based subjects to things like history or geography (as in places, etc, not the science parts) where it's just a bunch of arbitrary facts that you can't just guess or work out for yourself.
- Oh interesting, is it actually covered as part of the standard compulsory public school curriculum? Genuinely surprised, because here in Canada (Ontario) it's covered as an elective in 11th grade physics, which roughly 15/120 people in my graduating class opted to take.
- Each state maintains its own public school curriculum, so generalizing about US education in the first place is a fool’s errand. But certainly in many states, students will take a generic science course covering the basics of Newtonian mechanics, the periodic table, and Mendelian genetics in middle school (roughly ages 12-14) before more specialized courses become available in high school, such as Physics or Biology where these subjects would be covered in greater depth and breadth.
- Perhaps they were taught about it, but did they learn it?
Have they retained that knowledge beyond the test at the end of the semester?
Anecdotal observations would imply that they have indeed been taught it, and indeed have failed to retain the concept.
I have no rigorous data regarding either; but the generally poor outcomes which appear as result of a lack of retention of scientific, math, socio-economic, and anthropological instruction do seem self evident both from within and outside of the US, in headlines and actions, writ large and for all to see.
Is the problem the use of teaching methods which focus on short-term memorization rather than conceptual comprehension? Is it the lack of support for instructors? Is it a lack of focus in the student body? Is it some or all of the above in varying degree? Or something else entirely?
- My man, it’s a slippy sloppy app claude coded possibly in an afternoon at best…
- I used <tab> and <space> and left the mouse hovering over the continue button, and it went very quickly.
- 69400 for me, and I knew I fucked up on ~ 5 I really did know.. or perhaps I didn't know them as well as I thought?
- "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia"
Hippopotamus does mean river horse and I was caught out by that (note the o instead of a in ...poto...). I think that word is really a joke - lol - a bit like floccinausilihilipilification, which I wont bother looking up the speling 4.
- Various sources suggest it's a literal joke, e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hippopotomonstrosesquipedalio...
- I was gonna say, you spelled that wrong :p
- Unfortunate bullshit asymmetry here. Taking the time to thoughtfully point out inaccuracies in a piece of vibesludge excreted in seconds.
- “vibesludge”
^_^ hah what a great word, first time seeing it.
Another one I came across recently - “sloptimization”
- Not to bring up the topic de jure too early, but this seems like a very lazy usage of AI. Especially egregious when it’s to redo something that’s been done a thousand times…
- [dead]
- "what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?"
A lot of them, because being an anti-intellectual is 'cool'
- Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored.
I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust score at the beginning, then things settle down.
In practice this means you get a sequence of increasingly uncommon words initially, until you get one wrong, then you drop back to something easier until you start getting things right again, and eventually circle around words at your level.
Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick (or add an undo button).
- > Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick.
This, and accept that people will have incorrect input and build it into the confidence. Even the smartest person in the world sometimes makes clerical errors, or has the wrong neuron fire at the wrong moment.
- [dead]
- Moly holy the clicking is too much 3 clicks that could be one :O
- 300* that could be 100*
- Even better if keyboard keys (1,2,3,4) were also supported.
- +1 to all these points especially the first one. I dropped off after about 10 words and didn't have a clear path to move to the next level.
- It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.
- Level 5 grandmaster was hardcore!
- I got zeitgeist, panacea and obfuscate on Level 5... wut?
Some at Level 4 was definitely a lot more obscure than those.
- How jejune of you.
- It does get hard enough but only in the very last fraction.
Zenzizenzizenzic for example.
- If I had to write out the definition, I’d have been screwed. The recursive structure of the word makes it out as a child’s word or something from mathematics. Given where it is in the game, that left one answer out of the four.
- It gets impossible. Yarborough is apparently not a town in England. I guess technically it's a village but come on...
- > It also doesn't get hard enough
Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?
- I thought that one was pretty well known. But then, I can also rattle off Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch at will.
- But why?
say what you like about antidisestablishmentarianism; at least it's an ethos
- Somebody obviously coined the word as a self-referential joke. And somehow it stuck. That makes it memorable.
Speaking of things that stick... arachibutyrophobia is the feat of getting peanut putter stuck to the roof of your mouth. (I admit I had to look that one up, as it's not nearly as memorable, though I knew the word existed).
- They are Welsh?
I too can say it and I'm very English...ish. LlanPG is a tourist attraction and a great example of an amateur advertising idea smashing it!
- That's round 2 of England's established church problems. Not as bad as round 1, where the Catholic church was violently disestablished by Henry VIII so he could divorce his wife. Cromwell told the Catholics they could go "to hell or to Carna". I've been to Carna. It's bleak.
It's hard to disestablish a religion. Too many people believe. In Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church came back after Communism went down. Now Putin uses it to reinforce his rule.
- > so he could divorce his wife
That’s the schoolyard version of the story. In reality dissatisfaction with the church hierarchy had been simmering for some time, both in England and in Europe. Henry wouldn’t have gotten away with the split if it hadn’t enjoyed widespread support from the general public, the political class and the aristocracy.
- The real question is, do you know what it means?
- :D I did better than expected, but I did miss that one. I learned some fun ones.
- Based on only missing that one, it figured out. I knew 83,000 words. That seems unsupportable
- Lol. Yeah. Non native here but gave up at about 50 words. Too many words, too easy. And my English SUCKS
- If you gave up at 50, that means you skipped the difficult words.
- True. I tried a few more times. There is just so much wrong with the design. First 90 words super easy and then super hard? Why not random? Why is the longest description the correct one? Why so many? Why 3 clicks?
- Plus a scroll on mobile because the submit button is below the fold, though it seems to stay in the right place after the first scroll.
- Vibe coders don't know 'bout my dvh.
- > Also - too many clicks per word.
They’re also too far away. I’m on a laptop and I have to keep moving the cursor up and down just to confirm. Give each option a letter or number and let me press it to choose the answer¹.
¹ There is (was?) some service for forms which does that and it works quite well. I think it was Typeform, but I just opened the website to check and—of course—it’s now just plastered with mentions of AI so I lost interest in verifying.
- it's intentional. therefore testing vocab isn't the point.
I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments
- > it's intentional.
What is?
> I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments
I fail to see the point. For one, the compliments aren’t particularly good or interesting; for another, I didn’t even read them (I just went back to check after your comment), I simply clicked when seeing green.
- too many clicks per word. and the distance between click points. that's intentional.
well the point would be to see how susceptible you are to that. They're figuring out where your cost vs reward tipping point is.
- Can you elaborate? Who are the imagined "they", and in what way are they conducting experiments with or monetizing this investigation?
- some people will crawl a mile for a promise. some people get skinny on a diet of promises
- I think you’re reading too much into it. I think it’s just a common design pattern that was copied and is clearly optimised for mobile, where the distance doesn’t matter that much.
Anyway, if they were running metrics on that they just became useless because I automated responding to it a bunch of times.
- There's a small handful, mostly QI-inspired.
- 100 is too many? Thats two or three minutes at most.
I would suggest a bias in this test towards reading. More than a couple are words i know but rarely see in print. But maybe im too much a fan of british TV so i hear many of thier words without seeing them written down.
- Did you actually do 100 words? It wasn't two or three minutes. With good UX, sure. But I wasn't getting through 1 word per second.
- I did. Missed two. If you know a word there is no thinking time. Im on tablet so i was probably fast on the clicking, but not like korean gamer fast.
- I don't know, I read each option for the first 20 or 30 in case there were any trick questions. There were a couple later where 1 option was very close to the meaning and 1 was much better. I actually got one wrong (can't remember what now, shame there's no summary at the end) where I chose one and it said another answer was correct, but I knew the meaning I chose was also valid.
- I guess you just have a higher tolerance for inconvenience than me
- yeah, it should just be click->next;
I got tired after 8 words, looked at how many I'm suppose to know and gave up.
It'd be improved with statistical analysis; just progressively get harder and try to guess. If you wanted to gameify, you could update the stats after each answer.
- Also the explanations are too broad.
F.e. Frugal - Economical with money or goods
I don’t think frugal means economical it means rather over the top …
Yeah I don’t know how to define it properly but I don’t need to learn new words if they don’t even teach the right meaning
Ai slop
- That seems a pretty good definition of 'frugal' to me. To be excessively frugal would be miserly, tight-fisted or whatever.
There were a couple of definitions I did think were a bit off, e.g. 'zenith' and 'nihilism'. And one word where two answers seemed valid but I forget which.
Sometimes it gives one of several possible meanings but that's a valid choice.
In general I think it's a fun quiz - agreed with others though that the word selection brackets aren't ideal. It spends a lot of time on everyday vocabulary, then jumps straight into long words that someone made up one day as a joke.
The words I find most interesting are those that convey some subtle nuance, or describe some very specific thing - tools for old crafts, uncommon but genuinely used adjectives and the like. Very few of those appear.
- "Frugal" most definitely does not mean "rather over the top" unless that is some new slang meaning I've never heard of.
- You can look it up in a dictionary? See, e.g., https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=fruga...
- That definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.
- Seems like I’m the idiot here.
I had frugal stored as more than just economical.
Thanks for your comments :/
- Frugal doesn't mean anything "excessive," it's not the same as a cheapskate or tightwad.
Being frugal just means allocating scarce resources in a way that provides most utility and value.
- Seems like you don't know what frugal means at all!
- In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error.
(context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score)
I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words?
Their "How is this calculated" page that appears at the end explains their error:
> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.
> We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:
> 1. Core Basics ~3,000 words > 2. Intermediate ~7,000 words > 3. Advanced ~10,000 words > 4. Expert ~25,000 words > 5. The Obscure ~40,000+ words
> If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band.
> Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)
Their strata add up to 85000, not ~170k, making a perfect score still give a 50%.
They're also using a pretty limited and perhaps non-difficulty-representative subset of the language.
Cute, but wrong on many counts.
- Exactly the same feedback: I got all 100 correct, and the results were the same as yours.
As it usually happens in this kind of "check your vocabulary" tests in English, being Greek gives you an advantage in higher levels ;-)
- I'm Greek too and I got 81 (well technically I misclicked one in a hurry, would've been 82). It did help a bit though. Surprisingly enough I've learnt many of the more advanced words from technical blogs!
- I rely on being Geek for advantage.
- A lot are also just guessable because 3 out of the 4 definitions are obvious nonsense. I'd rather have a "I don't know this word" button than just pick the one that's obviously correct out of the 4, if the goal is to get a real estimate.
- Funny enough, usually the correct answer is the option with the most number of letters/words. I found myself just picking the longest answer and by a wide margin it was the correct answer.
- I wanted to know my real score so I intentionally picked the answer most likely to be wrong in those instances.
- Yeah I scored well enough and only missed 3, but that’s just because it was very easy to “guess well”.
There were many words I didn’t know though.
- I agree with the others
But the choice of "advanced words" seems a bit odd. Obscure, isnt that obscure.
Sure there are some speciality words, but most of these words are just the stuff you're gonna hear on radio4 in normal conversation
- I had that discussion with my high school English teacher. We used USA oriented books and they often introduce "advanced vocabulary" which should have been trivial for Spanish speakers, or any latin language speaker for the matter.
I suppose they evaluate difficulty based on origin of the word. If you already know German or Spanish you may have a head start when learning English, but on a different subset of it.
- Confusingly I got three wrong but got the same vocab estimate.
- It was clearly built with AI.
- Is this a problem? I thought it was fun, personally, even if the author used AI to help build it.
- It's obviously a problem because it doesn't work as intended/at all. What's point of building something like this if it doesn't work? At best its a waste of everyone's time, at worst it's misleading.
- It's not fun because it isn't challenging. I have an expert-1 level of English as a native speaker and heavy reader. But absolutely nothing in this is challenging at all. The one question I got wrong was because the 4 proscribed answer options weren't specific enough. So overall there's no value in this.
- I think I got 80 correct and got 57k.
- What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100
- I read a lot, and have since I was a child
edit: also, native English (well, American) speaker
- Same here. Also, I studied Latin and Greek in school and have kept studying them in various ways since then. I think this test is significantly biased toward vocabulary with these origins; dozens of tested words are directly recognizable as the "ordinary" Latin or Greek words for some concepts, or direct combinations of common Latin or Greek roots.
A lot of prestigious and scholarly vocabulary in English has come in through Latin and Greek (at various points in the history of English!), so you can learn that vocabulary or make it more memorable or more transparent either by studying Latin and Greek as languages, or just by studying some of their common morphemes (e.g. there are lists of Latin and Greek roots that may be given to medical or life sciences students to help them learn to recognize the meaning of terminology coined from these languages, even without speaking the languages).
But I think it's actually unrepresentative of the English language as a whole if we're literally thinking about vocabulary size rather than historical prestige of some part of the vocabulary. For example, foreign foods like "nori", "pandan", "dolma", "vichyssoise"[1], or "berbere" are often used as English words and would probably appear in large English dictionaries nowadays. None of that was tested in this quiz. I saw one foreign political term which I guessed at, and one or two German loanwords which I knew (I've also studied German), and almost everything else was Latin or Greek origins!
[1] apparently coined by a French-speaking American based on French roots?
- I got 96. I think I knew about 87 of them just from knowing them, and the rest I got with a bit of Latin and Greek background (eg a word starting with “ab” is likely to mean “away from”), plus there’s a pattern to how they’d generated the wrong answers.
- I missed two, but I’m willing to be tthey’re similar to me - I read a lot and whenever I encounter a new word I don’t know, I usually look up its etymology.
- As an aside, I am also an avid reader, always have been, 790 on the !math part of the SAT back in the very early 2000s.
I attribute most of my success in life to reading early and often. Bartending in college rounded out the social skills (for me) but those two skills have carried me further than I anticipated, coming from a poor background.
Have you found the same to be true?
- How did bartending improve your social skills? On the surface, it looks like a regular customer service job.
- Guessing you've never worked a service job. It's a good way to learn how to interact with the public early on. The success model is not being fired for bad social customer interactions.
Even if you're an introvert, working for a couple months at Olive Garden when you're 19 helps you to smile and be polite when 80% of the customers are mouth breathing idiots. Turns out they aren't all mouth breathers and those para social skills come into play later during your career.
I highly support kids of all origins working in service for a bit. Ain't a class thing, but is very helpful in getting used to the breadth and depth of people.
- The length and breadth of conversations you tend to get into as a bartender far exceed nearly any other customer service job. Not to mention it's frequently with the same people.
There are few professions where it's not unusual to have an hour+ conversation about literally any topic, and then potentially do it again the next day with the same person about a different topic. More similar to a therapist than customer service.
- It is quite easy to cheese the problems: many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back"), many problem have this "correct answer + opposite meaning + 2 unrelated things" answer structure, and for the second half of the answers, very often the longest answer is the correct one. The wrong options are not well designed here.
The sample of words is also heavily biased towards concepts relating to words, speech, speakers, and/or persuation. They are likely generated by an LLM which is primed on the task of choosing words, and end up choosing words related to "words".
For context, I'm an L2 speaker, linguistic nerd, and I use English mostly in academic/professional settings. I got 75,400 by a combination of the tactics above; in reality it might be closer to 10-15k.
The design is also painfully similar to Duolingo if anyone can spot that.
- > many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back”)
I had to look up the English word (lumbago), but German has the colorful “Hexenschuss” (witch shot). I suspect most people above a certain age can relate to there being a word for this in most languages.
- Also, every alternative containing a semicolon was the correct one.
- >The design is also painfully similar to Duolingo if anyone can spot that.
Yeah. Clocked it from the landing page.
- Pretty fun.
I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow.
Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.
- It'd also be a lot less awkward to go through 100 words if it had keyboard shortcuts (1-4 for the words, enter to submit) and if they fixed the layout shift jank
- wouldn't even let me tab to sumbit, you had to click, tab through each following option, then to submit, but then you had to tab again to confirm the submission!
- It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The distractor answers weren't convincing enough. For starters, when an answer was based on deconstructing the word into common English words, that ruled it out. After all, if it was, then it wouldn't have been obscure.
A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard. From the exams I know (excluding those whose nature precludes it, such as based on calculation or rote memorization) the only that does this brutally well is LEK (Polish medical graduate exam). It's nigh impossible to vibe guess it at more than random chance for someone outside the field.
- What I also noticed: when there are two contradictory definitions to choose from, it is usually one of those two.
For all its shortcomings, this was part of the fun, deducing the likely correct answer when you see a word for the first time.
- Yeah I also got exactly 74k. Stuff like “xylologist” I guessed had to do with vegetation because of “xylem”, whereas xylophone player was too on the nose. Then again, maybe knowing xylem in the first place makes 74k reasonable.
- Yeah I guessed that one right because xylophone player sounded like a trap.
I don't understand how they rank words though, some extremely common words like xenophobia were ranked as high as much more obscure ones.
- Haha. Yeah I figured Xylo- (wood) + sth. related to mono-poly so wood-seller made sense. Never have heard of this word before
- I think the test was vibe coded, because a xylologist is someone who studies wood, not someone who sells wood. I am not sure if "xylolgist" was the exact word, though.
xylo- = wood; -logy = study
Indeed from M-W: "a branch of dendrology dealing with the gross and the minute structure of wood"
- Seems to be a hapax legomenon https://www.oed.com/dictionary/xylopolist_n "OED's only evidence for xylopolist is from 1656, in the writing of Thomas Blount, antiquary and lexicographer."
- That test had several hapax legomena on it, so it would make sense.
- 66k for me, but I didn't get that word, instead I got ones like Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Flibbertigibbet, and Brobdingnagian... which the latter two interestingly do show up in my keyboard's word completion suggestions.
- I've encountered flibbertigibbet and Brobdingnagian. Never encountered hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia before, at least I don't remember encountering it.
Flibbertigibbet appears in some of the Little House on the Prairie (Laura and Mary) books, if I remember right.
And I've also read Gulliver's Travels which is where Brobdingnagian comes from. Brobdingnag was a land of giants. Pretty sure I've seen the word used elsewhere though.
- I knew Flibbertigibbet from the sound of music:
MARGARETTA: How do you find a word that means Maria?
BERTHE: A flibberti gibbet!
SOPHIA: A willo' the wisp!
MARGARETTA: A clown!
- in casual use you might also be able to guess it from context, so i think it’s a wash
- > A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard.
In case of online quiz you can have a "competition" between distractors:
1. start by having much more distractors than needed and pick randomly
2. for each measure the probability of it getting clicked (clicks/times it's shown)
3. show the most frequently clicked distractors more often
- Yeah, as I researched the topic of multiple choice exam design, seems the rule of thumb is to reject outright any distractors that are chosen by less than 5% of test takers.
- It would have been nice to have an “i don’t know” button. Instead I decided to select the first option for words I didn’t know instead of trying to figure them out. Although when I got to the final group I couldn’t resist trying to figure them out. It estimated 61k for me.
- Indeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!
- > I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so.
Having an answer counted as incorrect, just because I've accidentally touched the screen of the phone? I would absolutely hate that.
- It should be possible to respond "I don't know". When you really-really don't know, it's unfair to get a 1/4 chance at right anyway, or even better if you use routine multiple-choice tactics.
I got credit for a few that I would have happily just missed.
- Agreed
I did the full 100. It's not even 1/4, with the harder ones when one description is significantly longer than others, it's the correct one. Even outside that 2 choices are usually some object - which I think is never the correct answer
I'd also say the toughness should be mixed up a little. The last 30 or so became a slog
Cool idea though!
- Also a lot of questions had "right answer" / "opposite of right answer" pairs. Just by identifying those you get to 50% probability.
- Agreed, there were also a few where I deduced the correct definition by comparing the options.
- Yeah, I way overperformed on this test because it was multiple choice. There were 11 words I didn't know at all, and another 8 where I was uncertain to varying degrees. My score of 99/100 does not reflect my actual ability. Even the one I got wrong was a misclick.
- Miss-click!
I managed a paltry 90/100. Some of those words require a classical education and probably a British one at that. I studied Latin at two posh schools and have O level English Language and Literature (that's two qualis at age 16).
I'm pretty well read and know exactly who Sandi and Stephen are. Ironically Sandi is Danish but notably erudite (that turned up for me) and navigates her way around English with remarkable aplomb.
- Yeah it would just be easier and faster to have a Yes/No selection for each word and you just say whether you know the definition or not. That way you can blaze through all 100. Having keyboard shortcuts for each selection would help.
- It's probably more meaningful to force a guess, since you may guess on the basis of word elements that you do know. At worst, it's possible to compensate for a 25% chance of getting the right word by chance.
- I have a copy of the shorter Oxford English Dictionary from 1970 which I inherited. It is two massive volumes and is only shorter in comparison to the full dictionary which is 12 volumes (more in more modern editions).
My shorter OED contains 163,000 words (compared to the 600,000 words of the longer).
According to this site I know 71,000 words... Let's test that against the OED. I should have about 43% chance if knowing a word picked at random.
In my totally scientific test (ha) I chose 50 words at random from the OED and discovered I knew 29 of them for a score of 58% which is more than two sigma from 43%, this disproving the hypothesis.
I forgot what that was now, but it was a fun experiment.
- I also got something around 70-80k with 95/100 correct words (I don't know or use most of these words, but the later sections have a lot of words with Greek or Latin origin, which made them easy to guess). One of my wrong words was a misclick in the first section, which I think dragged down the estimate quite a lot. You may have done something similar. I assume they use a simple formula where early misses cost you a lot and late misses cost you very little.
- can't assume gaussian underlying distribution of the word-knowing, it's known zipfian. so you can't be doing anovas or anything of that nature because if you look up zipfian distribution's variance, you get Nature and Reality giving you the middle finger
- I think you mean it's lognormal, at least if we're discussing native English speakers or comparing those with similar amounts of exposure to the language.
(The median English speaker almost certainly knows several thousand words, or word stems to avoid duplication. But the number who know all words in the tail is exceptionally small.)
- No way is vocab size zipfian. Word counts from a corpus follow zipf's law, but not vocab sizes themselves.
Otherwise the most common vocab size would be equal to one.
- Not to mention, N=1
- Neat way to validate.
Your method of sampling could be improved further, unfortunately at the expense of ease of use. If the dictionary was sorted according to difficulty, then you could use stratified sampling.
I comment on the related aspects here.
- English is my third language. My vocabulary has been stuck at an "OK" level because I struggle to actually retain and understand new words.
I built https://segue.app to solve this. It uses illustrations (pictures) and etymology to help with deep understanding and long-term retention so words actually stick. Yeah, it is all AI generated.
- It seems like the right answer is usually the longest of the choices, I managed to get a few just by picking the longest. It would also be nice if there was a "I don't know" instead of guessing and skewing the results by getting it right, though maybe thats accounted for
- These were likely all AI generated, or at least the alternatives were. I made an app a while ago as well, and afterwards realized AI often wanted to make a very covering answer for the correct one, making it often longer than the others, thus defeating the idea of the quiz in the process.
- Yeah this is AI slop I don't like..
- Usually there were two answers that sounded like the word If read by someone unfamiliar, those were short, then either one or two long versions.
If one long versions you choose that, if two, then you choose the one that would be more useful to have a word assigned to it.
- > It seems like the right answer is usually the longest of the choices
You are correct. I tested that hypothesis about a dozen times and it seems that if you always pick the longest you’ll get it right somewhere in the high 70s to mid 80s. For anyone interested in testing for themselves, open the website to the first question then run this in the console (not going to spend time optimising it, it works well enough for the purpose):
let loopCount = 0 const loop = setInterval(() => { Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).slice(0, 4).reduce((long, curr) => curr.textContent.length > long.textContent.length ? curr : long).click() setTimeout(() => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).at(-1).click(), 100) setTimeout(() => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).at(-1).click(), 200) loopCount++ if (loopCount === 100) clearInterval(loop) }, 500)- Wow! great reproduce with less effort!
- cool
- Also surprisingly mostly the forst or last option (might be bias)
- Hahahhaha i got 62k points by just choosing the longest definitions. Great observation!
- Got 59,800, Performance Breakdown:
Core Basics 19/20
Intermediate 17/20
Advanced 19/20
Expert 14/20
Grandmaster 12/20
I guess, it's not too bad for a non-native speaker.
Minor feedback:
1. The correct answer for "Lethargic" is "Affected by lethargy". I think, definitions should not use words that share common root with the defined word, because:
a. it makes guessing too easy
b. it basically becomes a circular definition which is meaningless
2. Options almost always include 1 correct answer, 1 direct opposite and 2 completely random. Once you learn to recognise it, you can easily rule out 2 random options and have a 50/50 guess.
- I also felt the definition of lethargic was kind of silly, especially since I had already gotten lethargy as a word in tier 1.
- I scored slightly better than you. I missed 3 expert and 8 grandmaster...
It only pushed my score up to 65k.
- Not that I want to cheat in such a game, but for many words everything but correct definition is shorter or follow some "dumb rpg text" template.
Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.
Like for me most of more complex words been adjectives with few nouns. And in many cases you can just see 2/4 or 3/4 definitions are not for adjective.
- I feel like it make sense to just mix up definitions of different adjectives if it's adjective you looking at. With just little filtering to make sure you don't see repeatative definition options in different test words.
- > Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.
Yes, exactly like this.
- I was actually kind of impressed with how many of them didn't fall into that trap, but where all the options were roughly the same length and format. (For sure, a couple of the others were BS.)
- I think it was way too easy to guess corretly based on exluding obviously incorrect choises and then going with vibes.
There were many words I couldn't have explain the meaning of at all, if I wouldn't have had the options, but having the options made it easy. I wouldn't count those correct answers as a part of my vocabulary (even passive), even if I could answer with relative confidence.
- 78.000 (-2 advanced, -3 grandmaster), pretty good for a second language; the test's maximum appears to be 85.000.
The alternatives to choose between appear to be LLM-generated, you can see several patterns ("now" and "forever" appear a lot).
Years ago, I used to play a similar game that you could keep playing and where you levelled up when you had enough words correct in a row, or down for a single mistake. A fun thing about it was that at very high levels, it got easier for me because they mixed in some old English words which were essentially the same as in Dutch, my native language. There was a charity aspect to it as well, I think it was https://freerice.com/ , but they seem to have simplified the game now.
The university of Ghent (Belgium) also used to have an interesting test which rated your proficiency according to average scores at certain education levels. There I got 41.000 (IIRC), which was rated as average for a university-level native English speaker. An update at the bottom of https://languagehat.com/ghent-vocabulary-test/ discusses where that test went and has a few alternatives. Edit: https://www.myvocab.info/en is pretty similar to this test (found in another comment).
- If the goal is to actually calculate how many words we know, then you should include an "I don't know" option. Sure, some people will choose to guess to inflate their score, but some of us will be honest because we legitimately want to know our scores.
If you force me to guess, then I'm going to guess. Not only does that give me a 25% chance of getting it right at random, but as others have pointed out, it is very hard to make a multiple choice question that isn't guessable by an astute enough test taker. I think I knew 80 - 85 of those words, but I scored 97, because those questions were very guessable.
Also, reiterating everyone else's comments with respect to the UX needing fewer clicks, and also the definitions not being exact or precise in many cases.
- Feature request: fewer clicks. It should be one click per question
- I'd suggest a "toast" would suffice for the correct answers. Proceed to the next question when correct, with a "next" button when incorrect.
- another feature request: add a skip or "don't know" option. if i truly don't know a word then a lucky guess would inflate my score.
- Keyboard shortcuts would be nice as well. When I saw it was 100 questions I bailed.
- It should be zero clicks
- That was fun. Bit confused by the result because it says I was "wow are you stephen fry?" Which I assume meant I did decent. (72K).
But then below it said "you are a man of few words".
I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.
- Maybe "few words" means your larger vocabulary lets you use a single word to represent a concept that someone else would need several words to say. But the conversation ends up longer when the other person asks you to define the obscure word you just used.
- Combined with the factoid it features under "how is this calculated":
We must be geniuses, lol.However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words.- That tracks. Active vocabulary means the set of words that someone knows well enough to actually use in their speech or writing.
That's always going to be smaller than the set of words for which a person can choose the correct definition out of four options.
- For sure there is a bit of selection bias with hackernews users. Not saying we are all geniuses, but I strongly believe we are, at least, more educated than your average Joe
- There are words that I know from this quiz that I would never use in real life or in my writings. I’m not sure why. That’s the active vocabulary distinction.
- You are almost always going to find people with above average reading and writing skills on an online forum - especially one with such "curated" audience and spartan UI.
- > stephen fry
"May I compartmentalise? I hate to, but may I? may I?"
"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers"
"...saying the same weary things time after weary time: I love you. Don't go in there. Get out. You have no right to say that. Stop that. Why should I. That hurt. Help. Marjorie is dead"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg (fantastic sketch!)
- I like it a lot, but unfortunately you can cheat a bit: there are always two opposite answers and two unrelated ones. The correct answer is (almost?) always one of the opposites.
- Suggestion: Add an "I don't know" button. If I don't know a word, I can admit it - but if I have to guess, then I have a 1/4 chance of getting incorrect credit.
- The chances are actually often way better than 1/4. For the words I didn't know, I was almost always able to exclude one or two options. Sometimes even three, finding the solution by exclusion.
- Non-native speaker of English here, got 81k. Mostly with intelligence, not language skills.
Once you figure out the pattern of "one answer sounds like the requested word, two are opposites, one is unrelated", the test suddenly becomes easy. Not all questions follow that pattern, but many of them do.
Sometimes there are two or three answers that sound like the question, sometimes a word that is clearly an adjective relating to a person (ending in -us) has non-adjective definitions. I don't think there's even a single question where more than two of the answers make sense, even if you've never heard the word before. That leaves very little room for mistakes.
- This is the classic pattern of LLM generated MCQs.
- I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.
- "Defenestrate" was not in my list, but it's a word I would have gotten, as I know it from: (1) An A.C. Clarke short story ("The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch", in "Tales from the White Hart", if I remember correctly); and (2) The Defenstration of Prague (I have visited Prague Castle - there were apparently multiple defenestrations there). It's an interestingly (amusingly?) macabre word. (It also helps that I know high-school French and German plus understand Swedish as being very close to Norwegian.)
- Prague defenestration is a high school history concept that is self promoting due to the combination of "funny word" and macabre.
If there wasnt this fancy word for that, used in tests and quizzes it would be a footnote in history.
When another person dies in Russia by being thrown from the window, nobody calls it defenestration. We just call it a tuesday.
- Interesting. I didn’t have defenestrate in mine - I’d assumed they used the same word list.
- I got 88 out of 100, but all I learned from that is that I am really good at guessing. For something like 20 of the words I was able to guess by eliminating the options that sounded unlikely and in a few cases just guess from the meaning of parts of the word.
I'd prefer an "I don't know" option just for a more honest assessment of how many words I truly know versus how many words I can guess.
- Interesting choice of words I'd say: as a French person this test is pretty much a test about “how close is the English word to the original French meaning” as the test was almost devoid of obscure words of Germanic origin.
At least I learned a bunch of «faux-amis» in the process.
- In general the observation in English is that most words that are close to what medival lower classes did everyday (tree, cow, house, stool): (træ, ko, hus, stol) are of danish/norse origin, and those from French are related to what the upper class did (arbory, beef, mansion, chair): (arbor, bœuf, maison, chaise)
So not surprising perhaps that many of the more obscure words end up being french.
- > So not surprising perhaps that many of the more obscure words end up being french.
Of course, for a native speaker at least, but for people with English as a second language there are many lower-class words that we never encountered before, because they simply don't occur in books or in online discussions. I got 88 correct out of 100 in this list but I'm almost certain I'd have faired much worse had the list been about niche house or agricultural items.
What counts as "obscure" is highly context dependent.
- Some of the most obscure English words are essentially Dutch though. There was a test online at some point (see my other comment) that was quite hard for me but got easier at the very highest levels.
- Reading through the comments, I've noticed you can tell the native speakers by their scores in the word categories. A native speaker will score 20/20 in the first two bands and progressively less in the following ones. For those who have learned English as a foreign language, the scores are more evenly distributed.
So it's not uncommon to see a native English speaker totaling 90 as 20,20,19,17,14, and a foreigner reaching the same total as 18,18,18,18,18. Strangely enough, the algorithm favors the latter, because it assigns more weight to the higher-end bands.
Is this of any use? I doubt so, but it was fun.
P.S. of course a more reliable clue of nativeness is the use of "its" and "it's" interchangeably, a mistake EFL learners wouldn't do.
- I'm not a native speaker (Eastern Europe), and my scores are 20, 20, 17, 18, 15 - more aligned to your native speaker model.
- Oops! I had better revise my theory, then!
- At first I noticed that for many questions two or three of the answers are obviously wrong. So in many cases the correct answer can be guesses easily. But then I noticed that in 90% of the cases the correct answer is the longest of the four. This makes guessing even easier. The whole thing has a vibe-slopped feel to it.
- "It's a dead language!" they said, "It's a waste of time!" they said, "It's not like you can talk to dead Romans." they said. WHO IS LAUGHING NOW!?
- Learning Latin vocabulary is pretty useful. Latin grammar, not so much.
- Underappreciated comment
- The 171,476 figure from OED is used inaccurately in a way that shows a gross misunderstanding of dictionaries and language. The number 171,476 refers to the number of full entries for words in “current use” as defined in the 20-volume Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It does not represent words. It also does not include all the OED's variant spellings, inflected forms, phrases or run-ons (sub-entries derived from the main entries). Additionally, the OED is by no means a complete inventory of English. In fact, it's probably millions of words short, especially as it has an incredibly slow update cycle. Source: I am a dictionary editor and lexicographer, use OED daily, and know the people who make it.
- I am building in the language learning sector, and this test is almost certainly not accurate (depending on what you want to measure). It's fun and cool though. But basically this is all based on a frequency list, which itself depends on the corpus. I have not been able to find a good corpus of English which is representative of modern spoken English. Spoken english depends on your age range and subculture and and changes every few years. Example: https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/words
Most of the corpuses I've found heavily over-represent newspaper articles and books, obviously. So the frequency ranking is biased towards academic/crime/geopolitics, not spoken english. But even then, it depends what you most commonly speak about!
There's no better way to do it, though. I'm just providing context.
- A common pattern is the word's true definition and its opposite, plus two mostly unrelated meanings. So, when in doubt, you can improve your changes by picking one of the opposing pair. That's a bit of short-coming.
- These should maybe be checked through. Many are the second or third definitions, and some even reference the word in the definition e.g Lethargic: exhibiting lethargy
- A quirk of LLM generated MCQs is that in the majority of cases, the longest option is the right one.
- A much better test, which dynamically adjusts difficulty level: https://www.myvocab.info/en
- One soon discovers that those fancy words are not Ænglish words at all. If you know 6 other languages, you will pass this test 100%.
- Usually the longest answer is the correct one.
Also sometimes two options are the opposites of each others. In this case, one of them is correct.
I feel like you can get close to 70/100 with this heuristics, without actually knowing any words.
- An alternative algorithm which would probably converge faster than 100 questions would be something like Elo or Glicko 2.
A word's "difficulty" would be some function of how rare it is. Once you have a reasonable estimate of the user's "skill" you can infer that a user won't know more difficult words. The benefit of this is you're not spending time asking the user about words they probably know.
Of course it's possible at an individual level, difficulty does not monotonically increase as a function of how rare the word is. A person might be very familiar with a domain-specific subset of English. But the "stratified sampling" approach will also have this problem.
There is a similar problem in chess, where players have ratings which really only change on one dimension. So there can theoretically be a mismatch when puzzles are also scored on a single axis, since a "harder" puzzle that contains a motif a player is familiar with will actually be easier for the player.
- The harder words are trivia questions an educated English native could get. What I mean by this is they're all words that you'd have a chance of knowing for a reason. Things like defenestrate, antidisestablishmentarianism, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. I know these words, but these are not words I know because I've ever had cause to use them. Words can get way harder than this and still be actually used, and not strictly only in a scientific sense. I'm thinking things like "Ginnel" (narrow passage between houses) or "Vamp" (a part of a shoe) or "Moraines" (hilly landscape formed by glaciers) or "Lea" (land used to pasture animals)
- Even though it said ""Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?" it still estimates I know less than half the English vocabulary. Humbling.
- I found a big problem with this - I noticed that the longest answer is very often the correct one, which kinda ruined the game. Even though I didn't want it to, it started affecting my decision-making. Luckily, I only noticed this around question 85, though those are really the tricky ones.
Good news for the project is that I think you can easily tweak the LLM to generate better alternatives.
I got 89/100, which extrapolates to 72,700. As a non-native speaker, I'm quite happy with that.
- Yeah, it happened to me too. When I notice the pattern, I go right away for the longest one, and the answer was 90% correct!
- Nice! Some feedback: The score it shows doesn't really mean anything to me. I think it would be more interesting for the user to know how they rank (perhaps in percentile terms) relative to the overall english-speaking population and/or relative to other users on the site
- You’ll have to ask quiz takers for their SAT/ACT scores to estimate the (probably extreme) sample bias
- I could actually get almost all of the last third correctly by choosing the option that's the longest, has a semicolon, or a coma.
Aside from that, I didn't like that most of the words only had one or at most two definitions that sounded viable.
A lot of these words have either Latin or Greek origins, for most questions you can deduce the correct answer by asking the question: "Which of these would make sense to develop into a separate word through the mostly non-modern history of the language?".
I would enjoy it way more if all four options sounded equally viable, and I couldn't deduce the correct answer without actually being sure about the meaning of the word. I understand that coming up with choices like that for each question is way harder if you actually validate all of them manually.
I got a score of 76000 best estimate with 85 being correct, even though English is not my native language and I'm not that good at it.
- This app is a great example of what AI does to your brain. No one making their own choices in the app design would make each question need three clicks.
- Nice one, what I noticed is that out of 4 options 1 wrong is just something looking similar in letters, and 2 options are opposite meaning of each other - so actually the choice is 1 out of 2, not 4.
Also many highest difficulty words are actually combinations of multiple smaller words which makes it easier to guess, I got more right in expert/grandmaster than in advanced.
- It's hilarious that most of these words are French
- English has this weird dichotomy where most of the words in a typical sentence are Germanic, while most of the words in the dictionary are French.
Fun fact: according to a quick count by AI using web search, the previous sentence contains 21 words of Germanic origin, 2 of Latin origin, 2 of Greek origin and 1 of French origin. Also the etymology of the word Germanic is Latin, while that of the word French is Germanic
- Yes, English is a post-Hastings collision between Norman French and Anglo Saxon.
- Norman French due to the Norman invasion of 1066 resulting in Old English evolving into Middle English. You can see that in the words for animals vs meats (cow and boef/beef, sheep and mutton, etc.) where the Germanic people raised the sheep and the Norman aristocracy ate them.
A lot of the more common and simpler words are Germanic, as is the grammar (e.g. compound words like cupboard).
- Depends is bratwurst a German word or an English one? You will hard pressed to find an American that doesn’t know thr word and what it means. You can buy them at just about any grocery store and they are a staple of many restaurants.
At some point the word becomes both. Sourced from its mother language and maybe even still meaning the same thing in both, but no less an English word than any other at this point.
- Bratwurst is still a German word. It doesn't become English just because it's used by native English speakers. If you start to tweak it a bit, it could become an English word. Like "fish" vs. "Fisch" in German. Or "good" vs. "gut" in German.
- It also had "weltschmerz" in the list, but I think I have only ever heard "ennui" used in English. They are both foreign words, but I would not have thought of weltschmerz as a loan word. Then again, maybe I am not reading the right texts.
- They are not. Quite a few have Latin roots and the like that corresponding French words share.
- Approximately 0.0% of those came into English through Latin, while around 100% came through Norman French.
- That depends on when and how they entered English. A lot of scientific vocab was taken directly from Latin and Greek.
- Latin was commonly spoken amongst the educated at one time (served as a lingua franca across Europe) and used for religion and scientific discourse for even longer.
- French english speakers usually have a quite good vocabulary. Getting to the point of speaking english is a milestone that's quite difficult for french speakers though.
- English is the PHP of human languages.
- I'm not sure PHP deserved that...
- True. I'm French native but my English is better (educated in Australia) so this created a weird situation for me where I got 14/20 for advanced words and 19/20 for expert words.
To be fair, I think I messed up a few advanced words by accident but I think the general pattern would hold because many of the expert level words seemed to have French root. So it felt like it got easier towards the end for me. Grandmaster words were a bit weirder on the whole.
I'm an engineer and read mostly non-fiction so this probably explains the gap too.
- English also has a ridiculously high fraction of Latin too.
- Not from Latin but through French - the direct use of Latin in English is generally restricted to technical jargon and legal terms (that English often also share with the French.)
Latin isn't really any sort of parent to Old English afaik, even though the Romans ran Britain for a while.
- And French in turn was influenced a lot from Latin. Which means a lot of the French loan words have their origin in Latin. And of course Latin is actively used to this day in the Catholic church and the Church of England. Latin was widely used for written communication for quite some time. Most people couldn't read or write. But that impacted a lot of religious, scientific, legal, etc. communication and words. English also has a lot of loan words from other languages. Lots of nautical terms have an obvious Dutch origin, for example.
- It's not just influence: French descended from Vulgar Latin, with a lot of influence first from the Gaulish (Celtic) substrate and then from the Frankish (Germanic) conquerors.
- In order to stunt on the pors, English borrowed a fair amount of Latin and Greek directly - especially in law, philosophy, and the sciences.
- 90/100 and 13/20 expert & 17/20 gm. Not too bad for a non-native speaker (but I've read books in english daily for years)
- Would other people define "complacent" as "Smug satisfaction with oneself"? I'm not so sure.
Regardless, this was fun.
- yeah I was pretty confused to the answer of that one, I picked it because it was the closest thing that made sense.
- >Required Reading
>Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.
I actually have! I was very bored with the barely-above-"see spot run" books in the classroom at around 8, and we didn't yet have open access to the school library. The dictionary was a better option than all the others I had access to (in class).
Any other dictionary-completionists in here? Regardless of size - I'm fairly sure mine was rather small, though not a pocket-sized one.
- I think native speakers of Latin derived languages have an advantage given the proposed words in my run. The list was overly biased that way. In fact, many of the advance and grandmaster levels words are basically that. Latin derived words.
At least that was my experience as a native Italian speaker. My English vocabulary is good, but not great by any means and by reading books in English I know that there are plenty of words that are not derived from Latin
- there's also https://www.myvocab.info/en
From what I can tell they actually have a bit more robust science behind their algorithm (and a lot less questions to answer)
- This one's much better. Shorter, faster, adapts to one's level, gives an out for being unsure, largely doesn't bother with definitions (except the occasional verification challenge), and even mixes in some fake words to ensure you're not BS-ing.
- 78,500.
The very first one was "Unique". I wondered if "the only one of its kind" was still the correct answer, having seen "very unique" used all too often recently. They accept "only one of its kind".
Missed "hegemony" (wasn't sure a hegemony had a leader), "quotidian" (should have known that, seen it before), "ultracrepedarian" (new word to me), "absquatulate" (19th century slang), and "fartlek" (Swedish interval training).
- I got 35000, 18/13/9/9/6. Not my first language.
Interesting how literally everyone here's performing better than I do. Perhaps that's because I just clicked on the first option whenever I don't know about a word.
- This is rather like SAT from 35 years ago.
Same strategies apply for guessing the unknown especially with a modicum(it was on the test!) of Latin knowledge..
Strange that pretty every one here is getting 70k estimates (93/100 for me).
Feels a bit high at least for me as a non-native speaker.
I got 2 words I knew wrong, and guessed about 5 unknown words correctly. Those were bizarre repetitive words I've never seen before.
I remember doing a similar test from a reputable university about 10-15 years ago also in an app format and only got about 30k estimate.
- Interesting that this showed up here now. I did it a week ago after hearing about it on The Rest Is Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw
- This is where I got the link from.
- Desperately needs a skip button for words I don't know.
- Once you get to the Advanced/Expert words onwards it's too easy to guess the correct answer: it's usually the longest option. And once you notice this pattern it's impossible to try to guess fairly.
- I'm sure everyones scores would be a lot lower if we had to describe each word instead of selecting between silly/smart sounding definitions. As was mentioned before, it needs "I don't know" button, otherwise it's too easy to guess.
This approach could also work for getting more accurate results:
1. Show word without any definitions
2. User clicks "I know" or "I don't know"
3. If user clicked "I know", show actual definition of word
4. User selects "I was correct" or "I was not correct"
- I got 68,900 words, with the vast majority of the errors being on the grandmaster level.
As a non-native English speaker, I found that result pretty good! Though being a native Portuguese speaker certainly helped me as many difficult words in English borrow from Latin, and in Portuguese the Latin influence is more pronounced.
- There is a typo in "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," it should be "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia" instead. (Also, it breaks the layout.)
- Let the ironic screaming at the sight of this word commence!
- I kind of like how it breaks the layout, since it's such a ridiculous word
- also interrobang is rendered as bang-interro (!?) when it should be interro (?) then bang (!) -> (?!)
- There isn't a "correct" way to incorrectly render the interrobang as 2 separate characters. The name was never supposed to suggest a certain ordering instead of just being both at the same time. The name "interrobang" just sounded better than "exclamaquest" (or any of the alternatives Type Talks readers submitted).
- Huh, interesting. I retract my previous statement! I'd love to read about this if you have a source.
- No, it should be rendered with the proper Unicode: U+203D ‽
- do you really think so?!
I think bang-interro just didn't sound as nice and that's probably why it is called an interrobang.
- Ah, that explains why I got it wrong.
- [dead]
- Should use an ELO rating to find your level faster. Slogging through 100 basics is pointless.
- I know at least five.
- Presumably it's a random batch of words since you can run the test again. I wonder how much the word selection affects the outcome. I got 66,750 with 20/20/15/17/14.
I'm curious how the difficult is chosen because "obfuscate" was included in the hardest difficulty but I would not consider that to me a difficult word.
Also I found that some of the definitions were not completely correct.
- It could be based on things like word frequency. I'd expect obfuscate/obfuscation to be less common outside of programming and RPGs (Vampire the Masquerade).
- Picking max(len(answer)) is the right choice almost every time at the higher level..
- Cute, but for strange words clicking the longest explanation turned out to be akmost always rhe correct one :)
- It misses a "I don't know" button. So it has a 20% false positive by guessing bias built in, right?
- Yarborough is _also_ an English town so I should have got one more
- Same. Also, proper names should be excluded entirely; the only "Advanced" one I got wrong was a place name.
- 69,250 (91/100) - I think being French helped a lot for the most complex words, as they're basically the same!
- 89/100. Missed 4 in the advanced and 7 in the grandmasters. 100 is a lot to get through but hey I did learn 11 new words. There is one word I want to call out which made me laugh because I have felt it is just silly since I first heard my wife use it 30 years ago. Bumpershoot. I only knew the answer because of her. It is what her family calls an umbrella.
- Longest definition and semi-columns are strong biases for right answer. Also, my run contained a lot of adjectives for which it is pretty obvious that noun definitions do not match.
- This was fun! And it told me I know 55k words which made me a little happy.
I'm not sure exactly how you did this, but I think you asked an LLM to come up with the wrong options. Two things to consider:
1. While the LLM can go r good options, they won't be always hard to guess. I wonder if instead you can have the LLM generate very close words (or skip using an LLM entirely) and put those as the options. 2. If you will generate options with an LLM, make sure you are mindful of its inability to shuffle things around. The correct answer was overwhelmingly the first or second option in the list. You should ask the model to give the options in a uniform order (say from true meaning then decreasing amount of replayability), then manually shuffle them so that the probability of which option (A, B, C or D) is always 25%.
- I did it and achieved 69’400. English is a second language to me and I think this is quite overestimated, though. Mostly due to French being my first language and most of the advanced words in the tests were derived from French. Or some more academic use.
- Major flaw in the quiz: you can do great by just picking the longest definition.
- It's made with AI and I don't know to what extent. That's enough to have no trust in the results. As a non-native speaker I find those words weird. Some "core words" I have no idea about, but many of the expert ones are easy. So yeah, at least I hope the author had fun vibe-coding it.
- Having the name of a former Indian state doesn't seem to be cricket.
At least I can step away from the laptop now I've got RSI.
- What I read long ago in a book on English:
TV vocabulary is targeted at 6th grade reading level.
Conversational English is about 2,000 words.
High school vocabulary is about 10,000 words.
College degree vocabulary is about 30,000 words
English has over a million words.
Which heartens me, because it means I can be "fluent" in another language by learning just 2,000 words.
- Stuck it out to the end against my better judgement. Got 89/100 due to difficulties at the "Grandmaster" stage (12/20).
I thought it was going to be tougher because the very first word on my run was "Yield" and none of the options seemed convincing to me. I went with something that was at least fairly adjacent to the "something produced by" (as opposed to "submit to") meaning and this did successfully yield (he he) my first point.
- English being my language of choice, but not my first language, I got 75/100. Performance breakdown: 18/20, 18/20, 11/20, 18/20, 10/20.
(My first language is Russian.)
- 84/100, also English as a second language. Language of choice in technical stuff, mother tongue in abstract and emotional
- The longest answer choice is correct 80%+ of the time, when it should be closer to 25%. I was able to breeze through unfamiliar words just by picking the longest option every time…
- The option with more words appears to be the correct answer for each question.
- With the risk of giving a spoiler, it seems the correct answer is almost always the longer, more elaborate one.
I would guess this causes an up shift in results even if not consciously noticed.
- I flubbed a couple advanced/master and half of grandmaster, eh good enough.
Be fun to start at Master and up, but is kerfuffle really grandmaster?
Gaikwar and Kowtow are English words?
- Kowtow certainly is. Gaikwar is arguable.
- kowtow (叩頭) is a Cantonese word borrowed into English in the early 19th century.
- Exactly, it's been an english word for hundreds of years.
- "77,250words "Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"
I do concur that a refined collection of incorrect proposed responses which includes selections among terms with semantic proximity, conflated synonyms and plausible morphology could refine the accuracy of evaluations; and if the test was intended to bestow authentic assessments of lexicographical capability this would in all probability become an efficacious approach, but as a simply presentable quiz for folks with sesquipedalian proclivities I was not unduly discomfited by anything moreso than the extraneous clicks leading to and following the display of dichotomous determinations.
- God, I loathee the use of "moreso" as a synonym for "more" (rather than as "having the previously-mentioned property to a greater degree"). I'm convinced it's a hypercorrection by people who want to sound educated without actually thinking about the meaning of the words they use.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211458/more-so-o...
- Same here (72 750) but it doesn't feel right. I'm not a native speaker and I was able to guess some of them via elimination or cognates.
I'd say I know 10 000 words tops.
- You may know more words than you think, many are shared with French and other Romance languages, particularly the more esoteric ones (see what I did there?). Taking another recherché example: palimpsest - very similar in English, French, Greek.
- When there are two options that describe exactly the opposite of each other, it will be one of them. Reduced a bit the fun - but then again, for some words I understood what they are dealing with, but not whether positively or negatively.
- UX suggestion to make going thought this much faster:
1. Frame each option with one key (1,2,3,4). User press 2, select the second option
2. Let the user change options if they want until they press Enter. Enter submits the answer.
3. Once submitted, another Enter brings the next one
- Fascinating how many of the words I didn't know, but got correct from how they sound in my head which makes be believe this test is flawed.
- Far too slow to complete and too many clicks. I'm surprised it's not using a binary search method easy-hard-easy ... Then it could show an in progress metric.
- Only scored 93... One of those, "yclept" I've never ever encountered before (as a native Australian English speaker) and only lucked out by way of elimination.
- Good thing I read this post this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664
- Cool idea, am working through.
It's annoying that you need to click 3 times per question, and the buttons are in 2 different places.
Maybe would be better to just let me click the answer I want and then instantly show me the next question?
Also who is Sandi?
- Sandi Toksvig, the current host of the BBC program QI (Quite Interesting), previously hosted by Stephen Fry. She's also been on a number of other BBC TV and radio shows.
- I suspect Sandi Toksvig, one of the hosts of QI. One of the 'success' messages is "quite interestng!".
No offence mean to anyone, but the whole exercise feels very QI : superficial 'understanding' of a large range of things (for example words) without much of a connection between these words.
- Good fun! At first I was scared of having to answer 100 questions, but when the words got more sophisticated it turned to be more engaging. Also, the result is good for self-esteem! :) Many thanks to the author!
I wonder if the test is calibrated to the fact that some answers are just well guessed? I am not a native English speaker, but I speak 3 languages overall and have basic notions in Latin, and I have to admit it helped a lot in "deciphering" a few words that I didn't know at all. And in at least 2 cases I just guessed correctly.
- This was fun! The progression seems logical.
I scored 71,000.
- 75k here but a few of the later ones were lucky guesses.
- 71050, not bad for a non native speaker I guess. I missed 9/100.
But to be honest many that might catch out a native speaker are just the Spanish/French/Latin word, so it was too easy in a way.
- i can't move onto the next one in the quiz
- In addition to how much fun it was, it has potential pedagogic value for teaching sampling based estimation.
It would have paired well with an exposition of vanilla Monte Carlo and the benefits of stratified sampling.
Although stratified sampling is good, one can do better in this case by using adaptive sampling, where one uses a runtime (Bayesian) estimate of vocabulary to maximize information gain per question -- preferrentially sample from those strata where the current strata specific estimate has higher variance.
- 72k and I made one stupid mistake at "beginner". I'm not a native speaker.
- 87/100 64,250
A lot of words used in Software Engineering as metaphors helped.
Also one weird tip. If I didn't know the answer went for the negative description of human behaviour answer and I guess 50% chance rather than 1 in 4.
- I did 81/100 (not my first language) but I probably only knew 60 from before. But I speak other languages and so I can usually decode an origin of a word or I have seen other words in English or another language.
So it’s not a test of how many words you know but how good you are at guessing what words mean.
- 84 total, with this breakdown: Core Basics 19/20 Intermediate 20/20 Advanced 13/20 Expert 15/20 Grandmaster 17/20
Scientific Estimate: 69 100 word
It began very simple, so that I took it not very serious for a moment, but I never heard many of the later words. But thanks to knowing some latin and other languages, I could understand many of them.
A fun idea!
- 81k - which is interesting, because last time I did something similar, about 20y back, it was 50k. I'm not sure if I've improved.
- I like this but it should be all operable with keyboard to be faster ie up down and 1234 for options and if its righht you just move on, maybe show synonyms in the success ui.
- Gave it a try and got 78 correct out of 100, so it extrapolated it to me knowing about 55k+ words and saying most native speakers only get 15k - 35k...Interesting
- Mine was very similar.
Given this ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603397 ... I now wonder if the actual corrected estimate from it is even higher at 110K+, which would seem further off.
- I only got 4 wrong as a non-native speaker. Okay, I'm widely read in English, but among LLM-generated definitions it's just too easy to spot the right one.
- Pretty bad that there is no option of "I don't know". A couple of times I tried to guess the wrong word on purpose when I knew I had no clue what the word meant and accidentally got the right answer. I'd expect that admitting ignorance would be an option in such an app...
- Yes. One would want to avoid false positives for the accurate evaluation of one's vocabulary.
- Not sure what this is measuring. I did 30-40 words and got bored because the words are really basic. There's no challenge here. Not even a fun 5 minute game. These are basic English words, nothing extraordinarily hard to understand.
- Keep going. I got the first 80 words correct and only 11 of the last 20 words.
- Fun game! I did worse than many others here, only 69.9k estimated words. But then English is my second language, so I'm pretty pleased with the result!
- I wish it had keyboard shortcuts, it's a bit of a sludge to click through twice.
Got 64,650: 20/19/17/18/12 (the intermediate one was a dumb mistake)
- I have recently worked on the same kind of similar quiz for German.
However I have some other ideas and my quiz isn't "science based"
- in my quiz there are only "yes / no answers" This way you don't spend eternity reading descriptions of the word "apple". It also means I can estimate separately my passive and active vocabulary.
The OP missing "I don't know button" which will overestimate any result by 25% percent.
- I'm adjusting dynamically how many questions to ask in each bucket.
the goal of my quiz is to estimate a number of German words an English speaking learner has learned.
So I have curated vocabulary to remove "free words" like rare compounds of common words and other rare words which satisfy "any European knows this word without learning".
The final vocabulary used in a quiz is approx 8k words only
- I got 75k words, which I’m happy with as a non-native speaker. Others here have also mentioned that the math may be off and that you can juice the game by looking at how answers are phrased etc.
I do wonder how much of these were “what AI thinks are hard words to know” vs. actually hard to know.
- Really interesting, but I would love to be able to express honestly when I just guessed. This way the result would be much more scientifically sound. Four answers have a 25% chance of random correctness, which is a bit high in my opinion. I think either adding a "I don't know" or a confidence level (Known/educated guess/wild guess) would help.
- Got a bit boring then suddenly very hard with some really esoteric words at the end in the ‘grandmaster’ level. It’d be nice if it got progressively harder without levels.
Some definitions were not great and alternatives a little silly at times but on the whole seemed pretty accurate.
Also probably needs calibrated as 96/100 was projected to 77k words, what would the estimate be for 100/100?
- Haha, just pick the longest option and it will be right 90% of the time.
I used to do this in school tests too.
- I think that this needs an application of Bayes Rule against the ¼ chance I guessed and got it right by luck.
- Did the first 25, got all correct, got bored.
It needs some kind of auto adjusting difficulty...
- The difficulty goes up once every 20 words.
The final 2 categories were the ones that I found interesting, I had to guess a few times.
Got all correct though.
- The sampling needs to be smarter than make me pick the meanings of 100 words. If I get the first two correct, it should skyrocket the difficulty and assume I’m okay with the easy words, not make me sit through more.
- “You mastered 98 new words! THE VERDICT
You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing.”
—- This sounds more like a cute assessment of only getting two words right. And what do you mean “new words”? It wasn’t until eighty-odd words in that I actually got a word I didn’t know and had to guess by ruling out multiple-choice options.
- Nice work. I only got 90. It also summarized that as though I might learn English one day. Kind of an odd result. I’m not offended, just confused.
- vibe-coded index into the list of comments is backwards I guess
- This reminds me of a learning resource that I can't find again: you start with an assessment of how many words you know and then you get new words in context with every session (and maybe some spaces repetition). It was mostly from newspaper articles and catered for every level of English. It was a website (ca 2013), not an app. Any ideas?
- Fun idea, I've been wanting to create something similar to track which vocab words I have mastered. Two nits: (1) no need for a "check" button as other commenters have noted and (2) the UI jitters a bit when submitting answers for each question - it's a bit disorienting!
- I wish the option was just “yes I know this word” or “no I don’t”. Reading the definitions takes too long for so many words
- A different interaction design is used by https://testyourvocab.com : just a list of words with a checkbox for each. But it might encourage overconfidence. Before their acquisition by Preply, they also had an interesting blog with statistical analysis: https://web.archive.org/web/20210724115604/http://testyourvo...
The two tests give me widely different results, probably because the sampled words aren't perfectly representative and so the results should have huge error bars to account for this sampling error.
- I (native American English speaker, college prep school educated) had 5 words that I thought I knew, but still got wrong:
obsequious
laconic
sanguine
quotidian
enervate
On the other hand, I was able to correctly guess these words that I'd never seen before:
omphaloskepsis
crepuscular
absquatulate
callipygian
houghmagandy
quire
And then there were these, which were just totally foreign to me:
hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
nudiustertian
ergophobia
tittynope
Final estimate: ~73000 words
- Interesting but tiring, I gave up the first time, but was curious because of the comments here and tried again, without much attention and taking some breaks. On my device I had to scroll to reach the “next” button.
- This is great. I look forward to going through it after some of the suggested tweaks are applied! 100 seems daunting though.
- Super fun, got 70,250. Friends have always lightly ribbed me for having to go home and look up words i've used. Those remaining 100k words must be really obscure.
One suggestion would be more convincing decoy choices, some were pretty silly. But I have no idea how they come up with them.
- Open any technical textbook in an area slightly outside your domain and you will quickly disabuse yourself of the notion that majority of words are obscure. Most complex words are just technical/jargon not archaic or forgotten.
- I got 84/100 right. Their "Scientific Estimate" was that I know 65,300 words.
- Some of the definitions offered are slightly short of what I expect. Like for "Obsequious" it offers "obedient to an excessive or servile degree" which isn't wrong, but it misses the expression of a sort of noisy eagerness in that servility.
- Yeah, some definitions are super weird or overly specific, like ‘yield’ > ‘a specific amount of agricultural produce’ (iirc, ymmv)
- Yeah, that one seems inaccurate to me without reference to a unit of land or some other fixed input.
- I got 70,750 which is much higher than I expected. The early words were obvious. However, a lot of the later questions I could only answer because they were multiple choice. If I had to actually come up with a definition, I suspect my score would be much lower.
- It might be nice if you could unlock a "hard mode" or ability to the first 1-3 levels after a first run. I scored a little over 81K and considered playing again because I like quizzes, but doing another batch of (to me) easy words seemed like a waste.
- My results:
Scientific Estimate 72,650
You mastered 90 new words!
I like this. Nice job!
- I notice that the concept related to the right answer sometimes has an opposite counterpart.
- The UX is awful - I bailed out at 25/100 JUST IN LEVEL ONE (BASICS)
Might I suggest adaptive difficulty? After getting 10, 15, 20 correct in a row it should scale up the difficulty immediately, rather than waiting for 100 in the basic level 1...
- Check button hidden under the URL bar thing in safari, progress bar hidden when scrolling check button in view. In between endless whitespace.
- I got an estimate of 70,550, from a score of 87/100 (20/18/16/17/16). Not native English speaker.
I suppose the words must be weighed, because other people in the thread with more correct words got a not much higher estimate.
- There's no need to suppose:
From the website with just one more click - like one more wafer thin mint.
<snip> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.
However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words. The Algorithm
We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:
Calculation1. Core Basics~3,000 words 2. Intermediate~7,000 words 3. Advanced~10,000 words 4. Expert~25,000 words 5. The Obscure~40,000+ words"If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band."
Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size) </clip>
- Strange. I got a lower estimate despite getting more correct than you and getting more grandmaster words.
Admittedly I had to guess several. It’s kind of an etymological deduction and estimation game at times.
- For anyone who wants to take a real scaled vocabulary test, you can't beat the one given with Johnson O'Connor's aptitude tests.
- This dearly needs a "Don't know" or a "Skip" option.
Also, as others have said, mixing easy and difficult words would make the process less boring.
- Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise :D
My score: 78,000 words, 20/20/19/18/18.
- I got too many Greek words which obviously I got them right( guess why). does this qualify me as someone good at English words and their meaning?
- I ran through it twice, first time 91 second time 90, score: 69,500. Midwit confirmed.
- Weird. I got 87/100 and my score was 71,900.
I fumbled the Advanced at 14/20, but got 17/20 on each of the last 2 sections.
- On my first run I aced all of the sections until the last and then I got some really weird ones (e.g. zenzizenzizenzic). When I ran it again I got 95% new words and I fumbled a couple in the earlier rounds but did a bit better on the final section.
No cheating, only one or two guesses both rounds in the final section. No idea how the scoring works.
- apparently 54,000. Seems like it is including even fictional words though in this test (like from fiction novels). Ironically I scored higher on the expert words (18/20) than the "advanced" words (11/20)
- plenty of words and phrases originate from fiction
quixotic, scrooge, shangri-la, Uncle Tom, gargantuan, kafkaesque, blurb, milquetoast
and words like cyberspace were first used in fiction
once real people use them, they stop being fictional words
- The word was "Brobdingnagian", which apparently means "giant", from the book, Brobdingnag, published in the 1700s. I know all of the words you listed, even if I don't know t he books they came from, on the other hand, I've never heard anyone use "Brobdingnagian" and I've never heard of the book it came from either.
- Strangely, I knew this one. Once you hear this word it refuses to leave your head.
- I don't know that one, but I do know gargantuan, and pantagruelian, which come from a 17th century novel by Rabelais as well as yahoo and Lilliputian, which come from a 1726 novel by Swift.
- gargantuan and yahoo are common parlance, people actually use these, in spite of them not knowing their origin. When's the last time you've seen those written down, or spoken, anywhere aside from those nearly half millennia old books? I've never seen those.
- "Yahoo" and "Lilliputian" come from the same 1726 novel by Swift as "Brobdingnagian".
- Kafkaesque doesn’t originate directly from fiction like your other examples any more than a word like Dickensian does.
- Well it does and it doesn't. It wouldn't be a word if Franz Kafka hadn't written any fiction. Same for Dickensian.
- 43000.. It says I am a person of few words, and albeit true, I actually thought I did well... Until to started doing some crazy words...
It told me to read the dictionary.
- I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.
- Yeah I got 75k~ and did something similar ... most of the expert and grandmaster ones had at least 1 or 2 obvious incorrect answers, then it was a 50/50 so I usually went for the thing that sounded either closer to the root of the word or completely left-field
Anything up to expert was obvious
- Also, just pick the longest answer :)
- Please move the continue button closer to the options. I had to make my window smaller to avoid having to run between them with the mouse.
Also add a keyboard focus state on the continue button.
- I got 4 wrong but also I was getting weary and I made a couple of bad clicks.
- multiple choice is a cheat. the real test is whether you can define the word without seeing a menu of options to pick from.
- 76250, or 93/100. Native English speaker from London. Some of the last 10 words were seriously obscure.
Are accoutrement and ziggurat really English words? Accoutrement is even pronounced as French!
- Those are both on the list of words I thought should have been in a category or two lower because I consider them both sufficiently widely used.
- Weirdly enough, these words would be known to some non-native speakers as they show up every now and then in video games.
- I did 78000 and I'm not a native English speaker.
- Depending on what you consider an "English" word, anywhere from 0% to 100% of words are English words. I've definitely seen accoutrement and ziggurat in English, and quite often.
- Of course, the line is very blurry. I've used accoutrement(s) in English many times, but I've never considered myself to be speaking English when I use it. It's like joie de vivre or c'est la vie.
- What about "rendezvous", or "etiquette", or "RSVP", cliche, nuance, etc? Do you consider those French or English?
As you say, the line is very very blurry.
- My favorite in the vicinity of etiquette and rendezvous is the "double entendre", very French sounding, but not French at all. That and something being not a person's "forte" which when correctly pronounced is just fort, but through confabulation with a musical term from Italian; forte: to play loudly, sounds more French to English speakers when mispronounced. C'est la vie.
Japanese loanwords really tickle my humour; バイト "Baito" : a casual, part-time, non-serious job. From the German "Arbeit" which is serious, macro-level employment or exertion.
- Rendezvous and cliche yes. Nuance, etiquette, RSVP no. It's instinctive so I can't explain but maybe because rendezvous and cliche require using French pronounciation. On this I think you could find more differing opinions than there are possible answers.
- Needs keyboard support ASAP. Using the mouse for something like this is a waste of time.
- Not a very good test. Too easy to guess many of the words, and the words seem to follow a theme. For example my list had five or six that had to do with speaking too much or too little (verbose, lugubrious, and a few others in that vein). And many easy words were placed late in the test (e.g. zeitgeist, facetious being in the expert and grand master categories?).
And it didn't even tell me at the end how many words I know!
There is a similar variant of such a test where you just go down a list of words of increasing obscurity, ticking the ones you are familiar with. If you do this once or twice, you can get a fairly good estimate of the actual number of words you know.
- Super high scores for the community!
I got 83/100 suggesting 60,000.
My SAT reading was 760/800.
- Not native English speaker (Norwegian), score: 55500.
But many of the hard words were quite similar to more common words we have here.
- 88/100, scores were 20/20/18/14/16. Born & raised in western Canada fwiw.
- This is something that could be done for other languages, word lists are easy.
I’m not sure how you’d gauge what knowing each word would indicate.
Also adequate options, that sound plausible.
- Some felt too easily guessable. Too many joke answers maybe?
- Find the pair of antonyms, and the answer will be one of those.
- Too much time spent on the basics, honestly. I'm at word 20 and still on the basics?
Each word is a double-click.
- There are 5 different levels and 20 words per level. I think it was ok, just hold out for it if you think it is fun.
- I completed it eventually, but until I completed the first 70 questions I was bored and it was a chore. I only started getting stuff wrong for the last 30 questions, and then it was interesting.
Maybe it should be designed to let you skip ahead if you want to.
- All the 3 incorrect answers are just indirect opposites of the correct one.Quite easy to determine which is correct, even without knowing the word
- Nice. I want one in Spanish so I can compare results.
- I like how it tests whether I know 170k words by requiring me to click on 170k words 3 times each
- Very easy for French speakers ahah
- Almost every correct answer is a longer string than the other multiple choice options.
- Was excited to take the test, even at 100 words, until I realized I had to manually click every input.
Test could be completed in 1/5 of the time if the user could use numeral keys [1, 2, 3, 4] plus "enter" to input selections instead of the cursor.
- The correct response for each word is ALMOST always the longest answer.
- I enjoyed some of the incorrect options. For "Debilitate" one of the options was "Remove a bill from the tab".
- Gaikwar - which I was able to guess was a former Indian state seems irrelevant as an “English” word especially given it seems to derive from a name that I have to assume is native to the region.
- >Gemini 3 Flash AI enough to ingore the results
- My native language Spanish, it actually helps with words like tergiversate, got 55,900.
- There are no hard words in this puzzle. This is all basic English.
- 81,250 97/100 without being a native speaker. Although truth be told only because I figured out how to guess well.
- As a fluent native speaker who has read thousands of books and sometimes reads dictionary entries for fun, a number of these definitions are actually slightly off.
"Verbose," for instance, is defined as "Using more words than are needed."
That's not exactly wrong, but it's kind of misleading. "Verbose" explicitly means using a large pile of words, drowning the reader in far more words than are strictly necessary.
"More words than are needed" could be as limited as "used a three-word construction in a sentence where it could have been one."
There are many more like this.
Please, I beg all of you - don't use LLMs to generate linguistic slop that claims to be linguistic education.
I weep for the world that is to come.
- I had no idea there was an English word specifically to describe throwing someone out of a window. Defenestrate.
- 59,400 - It said I'm a person of few words. It also recommended I read a dictionary. I feel some kind of way about that. :D
Fun!
- Scientific Estimate: 36,250. Nah, I'm far worse.
Probably not too bad for a person whose native language is not English.
- why use many word when few word do trick
- Nice tool - would love it if I could press a number on the keyboard to select and rapidly move through them.
- Getting "Obfuscate" as #99 and "Quixotic" as #100 made me feel exorbitantly smart.
- The longest answer is the correct answer for a lot of the questions
- Only got 63,150 words. Considering English is the 3rd language I learned, I think I did pretty well.
- Apparently I know 70,000 words... I got 90 out of 100 and it thinks I'm Stephen Fry!
- Stopped at "bumbershoot" because that's a nonsense Americanism[0] and life's too short to be giving credence to that madness.
[0] https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/11/bumbershoot-it-mean... "the digital archive of the Times of London, comprising 7,696,959 articles published between 1785 and 1985, yields precisely zero hits for bumbershoot"
- 78,250 is way more than I expected. I sure don't feel like I know 78,000 words.
- When I got "sanguine" wrong, I realized a huge portion of my vocabulary came from Magic: The Gathering. I'd guessed "red-faced and angry" because "blood-soaked" wasn't an option.
- i remember of such a link in July 2011 but i could only find that one which is a bit different
- How did you manage to remember the exact month? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=testyourvocab.com
- oh that's the correct link, well done! i distinctly remember the condition i was and that can only be July 2011 ; i have been lurking 2 more years before eventually creating an account here
- 79k. Missed three from the last group: Vagitus, Yarborough, and Quire.
- Lethargic had an option "having the quality of lethargy".
- i wonder if multiple choice is the best method to test this. given the ubiquity of LLMs, perhaps an open ended, free text field would be better. that way you’re forced to define the word as you see fit and the LLM checks?
also, some of these words are actually not good ‘obscure vocabulary’ but trivia crap. overall a bit AI slop and too easy.
- I had a feeling they are testing something else. Around 50% of correct answers were option 1
- This felt like it had the stink of AI on it and I was second-guessing myself about it: I don't play these kinds of trivia / questionnaire type games a lot, so maybe some of what I'm feeling comes from plain unfamiliarity.
But no - other people pointed out the same things I noticed, such as many of the wrong answers being very weird.
This could have been a neat game, but it is ruined by being unrefined AI slop.
- That sounds like a good application of Item Response Theory (IRT).
- Please add keyboard controls
- Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise?
- 81500 for me, but I'm French, and I've often remarked that supposedly "hard words" are just quite ordinary french words.
- It should be adaptive - immediately. Going through the 100 basic words is really tedious.
- For those interested in the nature of the later, harder words but not willing to work through the earlier sets, here are the ones from my run:
Level 0: Core Basics Abundant, Baffle, Candid, Dwell, Emerge, Frugal, Generic, Hinder, Impartial, Jovial, Knack, Lucid, Meager, Naive, Obsolete, Peculiar, Quench, Refute, Seldom, Tedious, Unique, Valid, Wary, Yearn, Zeal, Adequate, Barren, Coarse, Diligent, Esteem, Fickle, Gloom, Hoax, Ignite, Jolt, Keen, Linger, Mend, Numb, Omit, Pledge, Quota, Rural, Soothe, Toxic, Urge, Vow, Witty, Yield.
Level 1: Intermediate Acumen, Benevolent, Complacent, Dilapidated, Eloquent, Fabricate, Gregarious, Hypothetical, Imminent, Juxtapose, Lethargic, Meticulous, Nostalgia, Oblivious, Pragmatic, Reiterate, Scrutinize, Tentative, Ubiquitous, Verbose, Wane, Aesthetic, Bolster, Candor, Defer, Elicit, Furtive, Glut, Heed, Impeccable, Lament, Modicum, Notorious, Opulent, Plausible, Resilient, Stagnant, Trivial, Viable, Zenith.
Level 2: Advanced Alleviate, Breviary, Cacophony, Deferential, Ephemeral, Fastidious, Garrulous, Harangue, Iconoclast, Juggernaut, Laconic, Magnanimous, Nefarious, Obsequious, Paradigm, Recalcitrant, Sanguine, Taciturn, Ubiquity, Vacillate, Winsome, Zephyr, Abase, Banal, Capricious, Debilitate, Ebullient, Facetious, Gaikwar, Hackneyed, Idiosyncrasy, Jargon, Kindle, Labyrinth, Maverick, Narcissism, Ostracize, Palliate, Quagmire, Rancorous, Sagacity, Tantamount.
Level 3: Expert Abstemious, Bellicose, Chicanery, Deleterious, Enervate, Fatuous, Gauche, Hegemony, Inculcate, Jejune, Kowtow, Lugubrious, Mawkish, Nonsectarian, Obdurate, Pernicious, Quotidian, Recapitulate, Supercilious, Tempestuous, Unctuous, Vehement, Winnow, Xenophobe, Ziggurat, Acquiesce, Bombastic, Circumlocution, Desultory, Equinox, Fiduciary, Gerrymandering, Hubris, Incognito, Kinetic, Loquacious, Metamorphosis, Nihilism, Orthography, Precipitous, Quasar, Reparation, Soliloquy.
Level 4: Grandmaster (The Obscure) Accoutrement, Brobdingnagian, Crepuscular, Defenestrate, Equanimity, Flibbertigibbet, Grandiloquent, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Ineffable, Jingoism, Kerfuffle, Logorrhea, Mellifluous, Obfuscate, Panacea, Quixotic, Rococo, Sesquipedalian, Tergiversate, Ultracrepidarian, Vicissitude, Weltschmerz, Xeric, Yclept, Zeitgeist, Absquatulate, Bumbershoot, Callipygian, Dord, Ergophobia, Fartlek, Gobbledygook, Houghmagandy, Interrobang, Kakistocracy, Lollygag, Mumpsimus, Nudiustertian, Omphaloskepsis, Pogonotrophy, Quire, Ratoon, Snollygoster, Tittynope, Ucalegon, Vagitus, Widdershins, Xylopolist, Yarborough, Zenzizenzizenzic.
- 66k
- That was a nice diversion. I got 76,750.
- Love it, thanks for sharing!
- Ignoring the validity of the test, one of the more strange things I noticed is that apparently native English speakers only have a total vocabulary of 15k to 35k words? I probably live in a bubble, but that seems profoundly low.
- You don't need to know the words since 3 out of the 4 definitions are silly.
- I am trying to keep a subset. I don't aim for perfection so knowing all words is rather a pointless exercise in futility.
- The words clearly are not random. I don't know how the author chose the word bank, but it's not a representative sample. It's all fairly common words and then intentionally silly words that are very long (Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia), that wouldn't really appear from a random sample as frequently as they do. I tested myself from my own Webster's collegiate dictionary some years ago with actually random words and the results were way off compared to this.
- This was my result. I am clueless who Stephen Fry is.
SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE 74,000 words "Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"
You mastered 93 new words! THE VERDICT
You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing. REQUIRED READING
Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.
- The four options were generally:
* Correct word * Opposite definition * Another word's definition * Opposite of that word's definition
Which massively reduces the difficulty
- 67900
English is not my native language. I get my vocabulary from browsing the Internet. There is no way I know that many words.
- The wrong answers were generated by AI, and for nearly every entry 2 could be eliminated, so even a monkey can get 50% right.
Improve the wrong answers to be closer to the correct answer, to test the subject’s mastery.
Anyone who has practiced standardized tests would do well on this, even with poor vocab.
Also, too many Britishisms
- At least three
- Why not add keyboard shortcuts? Would make a much more polished desktop experience.
- > You know 60000 words, that’s not a lot, go back to reading the dictionary
Goes to the about section: an average native speaker knows 35000 words.
Ah yes, the classic British insult, should have known it.
- I got 74,400
You mastered 88 new words!
- 100%!
- They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha.
Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other.
This is why when people tell me I'm wrong, so often I feel smarter than they are. HN quizzes are conditioning me for some antisocial attitudes, I think.
- "Fair and impartial" being a phrase does not preclude "impartial" and "fair" from having overlapping meanings. English has plenty of phrases like that. "Vim and vigor" are synonyms. "Intents and purposes", "prim and proper", "born and bred", "leaps and bounds", "pins and needles", "movers and shakers", "hack and slash", etc.
Every dictionary I've checked so far has "fair" as a synonym for "impartial" and a definition that is more or less "treating all parties equally" while none have listed "uninterested in the results" or anything akin to it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impartial https://www.wordnik.com/words/impartial
- Ok. "Partial" means "unfair". You've cracked the code. My bad.
- > Partial means to favor one side or the other.
If partial means to favor one side over the other, and impartial is the antonym of partial, then the implied definition of impartial is ‘not favoring one side over the other,’ which can be rewritten as ‘treating all sides equally.’ Favoring one side over another is unequal treatment, it’s unfair to the side being treated worse than the favored side.
- In the end I correctly guessed what the quiz wanted me to pick, but came here to the replies to see if anyone else had the same hangup. The wording for me was "treating all rivals equally."
- Never forget that we live among a bunch of B+ students that were told they were geniuses all through grade school. I'm actually surprised that I don't have five angry replies telling me that I'm wrong and stupid... this place can be worse than reddit when it comes to that stuff.
- A couple
- The words are so easy that this is pointless, and three clicks per word means I'm not going to get to the harder ones at the end. A proper spread of very difficult words split between scientific, historical, artistic, linguistic, colloquial, old, new, colonial, etc would give a better sampling. If I know "palimpsest" I probably know "pledge" you don't need to cover much of the easy stuff.
- The initial section is way too long. Perhaps do an exponential difficulty increase?
I got 93 words (not a native speaker), but the expert/grandmaster words were kinda easy?
- > You mastered 100 new words!
No, I read about 97 words I already knew and guessed at a couple of made-up ones like "snollygoster".
Is this what passes for an advanced vocabulary in the US?
Also, it took far too many clicks per word, pretty tedious stuff.
- WAY too many clicks per word. One, max.
The green button (which should not exist) was also hidden under Firefox for Android's address bar until I tried to "scroll* to hide it.
- 76
- Funny that lots of words can be guessed correctly if one knows a few European languages. I speak Dutch, German, Russian, English and was able to recognize most of the words without ever using it in English. For example Seldom. It's very similar to Zelden in Dutch. I would never use the word Seldom though.
- Seldom is one of those words that's used occasionally in writing, but seldom in conversation.
- Funny enough I started using the word seldom more often in English, my native language, after I learned Swedish to fluency. Swedish has the word sällan which is cognate with the English word seldom but it’s commonly used in both spoken and written Swedish. Languages are fun!
- Seems too easy compared to the other tests like that I I've taken (my wife and I have a mini thing about this cause as in immigrant I'm not legally allowed to win at Scrabble but I do occasionally), I got 3 wrong and guessed maybe 3 more correctly without knowing them (vibe based i was usually between the two), getting 77k. That seems improbable... Also kinda lazy with many expert words where the longest definition is correct more often than not.
- I got 75,150
- 70,900
That was fun! tho a lot were cuz the longer the answer, the more likely it was to be right (for words I had utterly no clue)
Was really hard to stop once started lol
- The triple click is annoying.
I mean, select the word, then press check, then press continue.
It could be one single click and move to the next, show me my last result at the same time you ask me for the next one.
- I was doing well until I got to grandmaster.
Then I was doing poorly in grandmaster, until I realize you can ace grandmaster by just picking the longest explanation every time.
- Cool concept. but...
Vibe coders need to be forced to spend one day learning basic CSS before they're allowed to use an LLM to make a website and the internet would be a lot more pleasant as we move forward with slopification.. It doesn't have to be sloppy, and doesn't take all that much studying to at least be able to steer an llm in the right direction to make something look nice. At this point everything is just the same 3 colors and a centered flex column with weird spacing.
- this is a test for willingness to put up with the whole 100. It says something.
3 clicks per is what gives it away. and the little compliments. and that it's 100 questions
- whenever I run out of words I know, I make new ones.
- when you don’t know the right answer is always the longest one…
- The UI reminds me of another language-related app...
- I mean I know all English words, but this test has a problem that most correct answers are the longest ones.
- "How much time would you be willing spend on a poll just for the ego boost of being told your vocabulary is large?"
... got 95. Can't believe there's a word for a neighbor whose house is on fire.
- > "Yield: Produce or provide a natural product"
Eh?
- Meh. The UX should be able to simply have the selection indicate it is the choice rather than having to submit it too. It's too cumbersome to click through...
- [dead]
- [dead]
- I know maybe 20-30. I'm aware of maybe a few thousand.
I use the language to understand not get an effect
- Interesting, I don't have the time to go through 100 though and having to click on answer and then mouse down to continue is a slog.
- Fun fact: there's a test you can do called wordsum which correlates extremely highly, like .71, to IQ. It's just asking you 10 vocabulary questions. It turns out knowing advanced vocabulary correlates really well to IQ.
- I don't know if I can get behind .71 implying "correlates really well" ... that's the issue I had recently with talking with GPT, it was evaluating my logical reasoning ability based on the vocabulary I was employing. You don't need fancy words to be intelligent.
- I think people don't often have a good intuition about what different correlation coefficients actually look like or imply.
- I can see how that’s confusing. But I always remembering people saying “can I speak candidly about this?” With them following up going off on the subject in detail and lots of emotion.
- It marked this definition for “Candid” as incorrect. “Secretive and very guarded”
But Candid can certainly mean secretive, as in “Candid camera”.
- Candid does not mean "secretive and very guarded", though. People misunderstand the meaning of candid camera and assume it means "secret camera" and so use it that way, but that hasn't reached a level of misuse to redefine the meaning of candid.
- Got tripped up by "candid" as well. Have always thought it meant furtive or surreptitious. Well, it's never too late to learn.
- Surely it’s called Candid Camera specifically because it reveals something that would otherwise be hidden?
- I thought it’s candid because the subjects’ reactions are honest, unrehearsed.
- Yeah it is confusing me because in all cases the camera was hidden. I just think the definitions they give should be clearcut. There may be a case for saying that the way that word functions "in real life" is a bit different than the textbook definition, in some cases.
- Typically "candid" in photography means something like spontaneous and unposed (and therefore capturing something honest about the subject rather than unrehearsed). It doesn't imply that the camera is hidden, they just hid it in the TV show to make it easier to get those kinds of shots.
- It is, candid definitely does not mean secretive
- It is incorrect.
- Uh, no.
