How many of the 170k English words do you know?

https://vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app/

by abnry • 1 month ago

501 555 1 month ago

vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app

dtagames2• 1 month ago

This was fun! The progression seems logical.

I scored 71,000.

slices• 1 month ago

75k here but a few of the later ones were lucky guesses.

cubano• 1 month ago

Yes...exactly the same here although the guesses often had some grounding in the root of the word.

itsamario• 1 month ago

I know maybe 20-30. I'm aware of maybe a few thousand.

I use the language to understand not get an effect

goldenarm• 1 month ago

It's hilarious that most of these words are French

the_lonely_phon• 1 month ago

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.

mordechai9000• 1 month ago

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.

nairboon• 1 month ago

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.

rhdunn3• 1 month ago

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).

classified2• 1 month ago

English also has a ridiculously high fraction of Latin too.

pessimizer2• 1 month ago

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.

wongarsu• 1 month ago

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

smitty1e2• 1 month ago

Yes, English is a post-Hastings collision between Norman French and Anglo Saxon.

graemep• 1 month ago

They are not. Quite a few have Latin roots and the like that corresponding French words share.

pessimizer2• 1 month ago

Approximately 0.0% of those came into English through Latin, while around 100% came through Norman French.

I_am_tiberius• 1 month ago

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.

triceratops2• 1 month ago

English is the PHP of human languages.

GeoAtreides• 1 month ago

I'm not sure PHP deserved that...

goodpoint5• 1 month ago

That's harsh, English is a mess but PHP is worse.

jongjong• 1 month ago

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.

yorwba3• 1 month ago

There is a typo in "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," it should be "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia" instead. (Also, it breaks the layout.)

classified2• 1 month ago

I bet that "p" just bounced out of pure spite.

summarybot2• 1 month ago

Let the ironic screaming at the sight of this word commence!

bobson3812• 1 month ago

also interrobang is rendered as bang-interro (!?) when it should be interro (?) then bang (!) -> (?!)

spelufo2• 1 month ago

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.

egypturnash3• 1 month ago

No, it should be rendered with the proper Unicode: U+203D ‽

zamadatix2• 1 month ago

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).

alun2• 1 month ago

I kind of like how it breaks the layout, since it's such a ridiculous word

olalonde2• 1 month ago

Ah, that explains why I got it wrong.

fritzo• 1 month ago

Feature request: fewer clicks. It should be one click per question

TheJoeMan• 1 month ago

I'd suggest a "toast" would suffice for the correct answers. Proceed to the next question when correct, with a "next" button when incorrect.

ortusdux• 1 month ago

Keyboard shortcuts would be nice as well. When I saw it was 100 questions I bailed.

em-bee• 1 month ago

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.

goodpoint5• 1 month ago

It should be zero clicks

pastel8739• 1 month ago

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

yorwba3• 1 month ago

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.

thinkinguy• 1 month ago

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

jstanley• 1 month ago

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?

rhdunn3• 1 month ago

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.

gilleain• 1 month ago

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.

cm20123• 1 month ago

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.

summarybot2• 1 month ago

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.

rcxdude• 1 month ago

I think people don't often have a good intuition about what different correlation coefficients actually look like or imply.

cm20123• 1 month ago

High school GPA correlates much worse (.41). SATs correlates with IQ better - .82 or so.

Vaslo• 1 month ago

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.

Laurel1234• 1 month ago

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.

RicoElectrico2• 1 month ago

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.

_diyar• 1 month ago

in casual use you might also be able to guess it from context, so i think it’s a wash

datsci_est_20152• 1 month ago

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.

onionisafruit• 1 month ago

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.

vova_hn23• 1 month ago

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

scubbo4• 1 month ago

Indeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!

superjan• 1 month ago

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.

mpeg3• 1 month ago

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

goodmythical• 1 month ago

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!

vova_hn23• 1 month ago

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.

mdnahas• 1 month ago

Another suggestion: update an estimate of words known after every word. E.g. start out with a range of 0 to 170,000. Then after the first word, show 100 to 170,000. Etc.

Users get drops of information and can stop whenever they feel. I stopped well before 100.

trevwebdev• 1 month ago

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.

archildress• 1 month ago

Nice tool - would love it if I could press a number on the keyboard to select and rapidly move through them.

kiaofz• 1 month ago

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

notsylver• 1 month ago

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

orrito• 1 month ago

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.

EstanislaoStan2• 1 month ago

Yeah this is AI slop I don't like..

thenthenthen6• 1 month ago

Also surprisingly mostly the forst or last option (might be bias)

thenthenthen6• 1 month ago

Hahahhaha i got 62k points by just choosing the longest definitions. Great observation!

latexr4• 1 month ago

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)

libertyit• 1 month ago

cool

earthpyy2• 1 month ago

Wow! great reproduce with less effort!

jwrallie• 1 month ago

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.

jrrv• 1 month ago

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.

rhdunn3• 1 month ago

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).

fl4regun3• 1 month ago

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)

apical_dendrite3• 1 month ago

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

krustyburger• 1 month ago

Kafkaesque doesn’t originate directly from fiction like your other examples any more than a word like Dickensian does.

fl4regun3• 1 month ago

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.

croisillon2• 1 month ago

i remember of such a link in July 2011 but i could only find that one which is a bit different

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806377

yorwba3• 1 month ago

How did you manage to remember the exact month? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=testyourvocab.com

croisillon2• 1 month ago

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

WesleyJohnson• 1 month ago

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!

hmokiguess• 1 month ago

why use many word when few word do trick

sd93• 1 month ago

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).

datsci_est_20152• 1 month ago

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.

thenthenthen6• 1 month ago

Moly holy the clicking is too much 3 clicks that could be one :O

latexr4• 1 month ago

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.

analog83744• 1 month ago

it's intentional. therefore testing vocab isn't the point.

I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments

sandworm1012• 1 month ago

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.

sd93• 1 month ago

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.

DC-3• 1 month ago

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.

thenthenthen6• 1 month ago

Lol. Yeah. Non native here but gave up at about 50 words. Too many words, too easy. And my English SUCKS

alentred2• 1 month ago

It also doesn't get hard enough

Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?

philipwhiuk3• 1 month ago

It does get hard enough but only in the very last fraction.

Zenzizenzizenzic for example.

dgellow2• 1 month ago

Level 5 grandmaster was hardcore!

IshKebab2• 1 month ago

It gets impossible. Yarborough is apparently not a town in England. I guess technically it's a village but come on...

sowbug2• 1 month ago

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.

dolebirchwood• 1 month ago

Vibe coders don't know 'bout my dvh.

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

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.

dylanz• 1 month ago

+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.

jwpapi2• 1 month ago

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

Per_Bothner2• 1 month ago

"Frugal" most definitely does not mean "rather over the top" unless that is some new slang meaning I've never heard of.

tom_• 1 month ago

You can look it up in a dictionary? See, e.g., https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=fruga...

FLHerne• 1 month ago

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.

LeonB• 1 month ago

That definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.

IshKebab2• 1 month ago

Seems like you don't know what frugal means at all!

mcbetz• 1 month ago

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?

Johnny_Bonk• 1 month ago

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.

bluecalm• 1 month ago

67900

English is not my native language. I get my vocabulary from browsing the Internet. There is no way I know that many words.

kortex• 1 month ago

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.

ak_111• 1 month ago

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.

analog83744• 1 month ago

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

dakolli• 1 month ago

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.

sim04ful• 1 month ago

I notice that the concept related to the right answer sometimes has an opposite counterpart.

HaloZero• 1 month ago

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)

ItsBob• 1 month ago

Apparently I know 70,000 words... I got 90 out of 100 and it thinks I'm Stephen Fry!

popey• 1 month ago

That was a nice diversion. I got 76,750.

2bird3• 1 month ago

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

fcatalan• 1 month ago

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.

femto• 1 month ago

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.

mpeg3• 1 month ago

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

WithinReason2• 1 month ago

Also, just pick the longest answer :)

blatherard• 1 month ago

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.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 1 month ago

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.

zaik• 1 month ago

That sounds like a good application of Item Response Theory (IRT).

jdiff• 1 month ago

78,250 is way more than I expected. I sure don't feel like I know 78,000 words.

NickHoff• 1 month ago

I enjoyed some of the incorrect options. For "Debilitate" one of the options was "Remove a bill from the tab".

JauntyHatAngle• 1 month ago

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.

Joe_Cool2• 1 month ago

Combined with the factoid it features under "how is this calculated":

    However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words.

We must be geniuses, lol.

welshwelsh• 1 month ago

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.

ricardobayes• 1 month ago

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.

kccqzy• 1 month ago

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.

marcyb5st2• 1 month ago

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

sowbug2• 1 month ago

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.

gib444• 1 month ago

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!)

amarant• 1 month ago

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!

moron4hire• 1 month ago

Lethargic had an option "having the quality of lethargy".

tennfown• 1 month ago

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.

alistaira• 1 month ago

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.

grey-area3• 1 month ago

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?

yousif_123123• 1 month ago

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%.

ronbenton• 1 month ago

Some felt too easily guessable. Too many joke answers maybe?

ekjhgkejhgk• 1 month ago

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.

pgraf• 1 month ago

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.

naishoya5• 1 month ago

"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.

kubb• 1 month ago

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.

grey-area3• 1 month ago

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.

scubbo4• 1 month ago

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...

naishoya5• 1 month ago

lol, you have hit both of myreasons for using it: 1. the previously mentioned, as nothing in the quiz bothered me to a greater degree than what i previously stated, thus it's use here is 'cromulent'... and 2. this entire paragraph is tongue-in-cheek as a play at seemingly overreaching 'embiggenment'.

Thanks for playing along. :)

collabs• 1 month ago

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.

WithinReason2• 1 month ago

81,250 97/100 without being a native speaker. Although truth be told only because I figured out how to guess well.

itvision• 1 month ago

Scientific Estimate: 36,250. Nah, I'm far worse.

Probably not too bad for a person whose native language is not English.

fp64• 1 month ago

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.

franciscop• 1 month ago

Only got 63,150 words. Considering English is the 3rd language I learned, I think I did pretty well.

EstanislaoStan2• 1 month ago

Literally when I got to advanced and beyond just picking the longer and more complicated looking answer was the right one. I think this test is extremely flawed.

nickcw• 1 month ago

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.

pclmulqdq3• 1 month ago

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.

srean2• 1 month ago

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599769

curuinor• 1 month ago

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

soVeryTired• 1 month ago

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.

montag3• 1 month ago

Not to mention, N=1

dgacmu• 1 month ago

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.)

cake-rusk2• 1 month ago

Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise :D

My score: 78,000 words, 20/20/19/18/18.

waterpowder• 1 month ago

69,250 (91/100) - I think being French helped a lot for the most complex words, as they're basically the same!

walthamstow3• 1 month ago

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!

stavros3• 1 month ago

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.

walthamstow3• 1 month ago

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.

melasadra• 1 month ago

Weirdly enough, these words would be known to some non-native speakers as they show up every now and then in video games.

Glyptodon4• 1 month ago

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.

goodpoint5• 1 month ago

I did 78000 and I'm not a native English speaker.

jcattle• 1 month ago

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)

Jordan-117• 1 month ago

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.

spelufo2• 1 month ago

Nice. I want one in Spanish so I can compare results.

srean2• 1 month ago

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.

Joe_Cool2• 1 month ago

Getting "Obfuscate" as #99 and "Quixotic" as #100 made me feel exorbitantly smart.

alentred2• 1 month ago

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.

Findecanor• 1 month ago

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.

steve_adams_862• 1 month ago

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.

naishoya5• 1 month ago

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:

    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

Calculation

"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>

stavros3• 1 month ago

I got 98 words right and it estimated I know 82k words. That's less than half the quoted 170k number, so what would it have estimated at 99 or at 100?

leoc• 1 month ago

It estimates 83,000 for 99/100. I wouldn't take the guess too seriously, obviously.

egypturnash3• 1 month ago

“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.

steve_adams_862• 1 month ago

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.

egypturnash3• 1 month ago

vibe-coded index into the list of comments is backwards I guess

Glyptodon4• 1 month ago

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.

thenthenthen6• 1 month ago

Yeah, some definitions are super weird or overly specific, like ‘yield’ > ‘a specific amount of agricultural produce’ (iirc, ymmv)

Glyptodon4• 1 month ago

Yeah, that one seems inaccurate to me without reference to a unit of land or some other fixed input.

HyperL0gi• 1 month ago

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

NateEag• 1 month ago

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.

mattas• 1 month ago

I had no idea there was an English word specifically to describe throwing someone out of a window. Defenestrate.

chromatin• 1 month ago

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...

scary-size• 1 month ago

Check button hidden under the URL bar thing in safari, progress bar hidden when scrolling check button in view. In between endless whitespace.

juancn• 1 month ago

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.

dbingham• 1 month ago

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.

alkyon• 1 month ago

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.

vova_hn23• 1 month ago

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.

siegecraft• 1 month ago

I also felt the definition of lethargic was kind of silly, especially since I had already gotten lethargy as a word in tier 1.

firebot• 1 month ago

I scored slightly better than you. I missed 3 expert and 8 grandmaster...

It only pushed my score up to 65k.

philipwhiuk3• 1 month ago

The four options were generally:

* Correct word * Opposite definition * Another word's definition * Opposite of that word's definition

Which massively reduces the difficulty

cainxinth• 1 month ago

79k. Missed three from the last group: Vagitus, Yarborough, and Quire.

sceptic123• 1 month ago

Yarborough is _also_ an English town so I should have got one more

extra88• 1 month ago

Same. Also, proper names should be excluded entirely; the only "Advanced" one I got wrong was a place name.

sireat• 1 month ago

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.

zeristor• 1 month ago

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.

waltbosz• 1 month ago

I got 75,150

yreg• 1 month ago

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.

SSLy• 1 month ago

70k, which I believe is a fine result for a second language.

smitty1e2• 1 month ago

Good work. I was slightly below that as a native speaker with 88 correct.

nickvec• 1 month ago

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!

eudamoniac• 1 month ago

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.

AgentMasterRace• 1 month ago

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.

sershe• 1 month ago

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.

billfor2• 1 month ago

It marked this definition for “Candid” as incorrect. “Secretive and very guarded”

But Candid can certainly mean secretive, as in “Candid camera”.

ant6n• 1 month ago

I thought it’s candid because the subjects’ reactions are honest, unrehearsed.

billfor2• 1 month ago

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.

none2585• 1 month ago

It is, candid definitely does not mean secretive

thom• 1 month ago

Surely it’s called Candid Camera specifically because it reveals something that would otherwise be hidden?

gryson• 1 month ago

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.

avazhi2• 1 month ago

Uh, no.

orthoxerox• 1 month ago

Got tripped up by "candid" as well. Have always thought it meant furtive or surreptitious. Well, it's never too late to learn.

Glyptodon4• 1 month ago

It is incorrect.

holoduke• 1 month ago

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.

tkzed49• 1 month ago

Seldom is one of those words that's used occasionally in writing, but seldom in conversation.

adamfarhadi• 1 month ago

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!

kogus• 1 month ago

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.

sigmoid10• 1 month ago

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.

rout39574• 1 month ago

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.

tengwar23• 1 month ago

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.

supermdguy• 1 month ago

Agreed, there were also a few where I deduced the correct definition by comparing the options.

throwaway82931• 1 month ago

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.

dktp• 1 month ago

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!

ngruhn• 1 month ago

Also a lot of questions had "right answer" / "opposite of right answer" pairs. Just by identifying those you get to 50% probability.

e1ghtSpace• 1 month ago

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.

domatic1• 1 month ago

My native language Spanish, it actually helps with words like tergiversate, got 55,900.

rlewkov• 1 month ago

SXX2• 1 month ago

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.

SXX2• 1 month ago

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.

margalabargala4• 1 month ago

Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.

Yes, exactly like this.

andrewflnr2• 1 month ago

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.)

bw86• 1 month ago

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!

tengwar23• 1 month ago

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.

thimabi• 1 month ago

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.

9999gold• 1 month ago

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.

ThePowerOfFuet• 1 month ago

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.

alberto-m• 1 month ago

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.

avazhi2• 1 month ago

Interesting. I didn’t have defenestrate in mine - I’d assumed they used the same word list.

pratikdeoghare• 1 month ago

Totally. After studying few hundred words of Spanish, German and French I thought hmm maybe a way to level up English is to learn basics of other languages. For example Fenster is Window in German. Defenestration becomes easy guess.

Per_Bothner2• 1 month ago

"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.)

rvba2• 1 month ago

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.

dgellow2• 1 month ago

Love it, thanks for sharing!

stbullard• 1 month ago

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.

guidedlight• 1 month ago

It was clearly built with AI.

tomrod• 1 month ago

Is this a problem? I thought it was fun, personally, even if the author used AI to help build it.

irishcoffee• 1 month ago

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?

copperx• 1 month ago

How did bartending improve your social skills? On the surface, it looks like a regular customer service job.

iLoveOncall• 1 month ago

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.

Enginerrrd• 1 month ago

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.

utdoctor• 1 month ago

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.

maplethorpe• 1 month ago

I wanted to know my real score so I intentionally picked the answer most likely to be wrong in those instances.

zvr• 1 month ago

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 ;-)

a022311• 1 month ago

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!

WalterBright2• 1 month ago

I rely on being Geek for advantage.

jzer0cool• 1 month ago

What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100

dogmatism• 1 month ago

I read a lot, and have since I was a child

edit: also, native English (well, American) speaker

devmor• 1 month ago

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.

petesergeant• 1 month ago

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.

KaiserPro• 1 month ago

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

estebarb• 1 month ago

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.

whateverboat• 1 month ago

I think I got 80 correct and got 57k.

stevage• 1 month ago

Confusingly I got three wrong but got the same vocab estimate.

vhayda• 1 month ago

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…

hiccuphippo• 1 month ago

Haha, just pick the longest option and it will be right 90% of the time.

I used to do this in school tests too.

alun2• 1 month ago

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

montag3• 1 month ago

You’ll have to ask quiz takers for their SAT/ACT scores to estimate the (probably extreme) sample bias

d--b• 1 month ago

when you don’t know the right answer is always the longest one…

kwxyz• 1 month ago

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.

pstuart• 1 month ago

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...

FinnLobsien• 1 month ago

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.

secondcoming• 1 month ago

"Yield: Produce or provide a natural product"

Eh?

TrackerFF• 1 month ago

Not native English speaker (Norwegian), score: 55500.

But many of the hard words were quite similar to more common words we have here.

brianleb• 1 month ago

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).

gerdesj3• 1 month ago

"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.

alienbaby2• 1 month ago

I was gonna say, you spelled that wrong :p

andrewflnr2• 1 month ago

Various sources suggest it's a literal joke, e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hippopotomonstrosesquipedalio...

montag3• 1 month ago

The test hardly seems adaptive (if at all) and yet it made the HN front page. That’s impressive.

ralferoo3• 1 month ago

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...

alienbaby2• 1 month ago

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?

trebligdivad• 1 month ago

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.

wingmanjd• 1 month ago

Ha, a Wikipedia article link to Zenzizenzizenzic was on HN earlier today! I don't think I would have gotten that one right otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664

kurthr• 1 month ago

Yep, 'panacea' was grandmaster, but 'quire' was intermediate?

kevin_thibedeau• 1 month ago

what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?

95% of Americans.

buzzerbetrayed• 1 month ago

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.

julianeon• 1 month ago

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.

bbor2• 1 month ago

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...

hatthew• 1 month ago

To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia

beojan• 1 month ago

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".

klempner• 1 month ago

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.)

mpreda• 1 month ago

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.

FireBeyond• 1 month ago

Ucalegon was perhaps the most ridiculous to me, much more a factor of your knowledge of classical literature than vocabulary.

phatskat• 1 month ago

I was, as was gp, confused by “complacent” as I haven’t typically used it or thought of it to include a smugness and immediately went to the ol’ Google only to find that “smug” appears in Oxford Language’s* definition as well. The key though is “smug or uncritical”, so while smug may not be typical for some it does make sense now that I have that added knowledge.

And iirc “gauche” had more than just “socially awkward” in the correct answer but speeding through it again I didn’t get gauche as a word. That said, something gauche, to me, has always been something glaringly “not ok” in a social sense so again, that tracks. Oxford Language defines it as

lacking ease or grace; unsophisticated and socially awkward.

Which is closer to the quiz’s definition and again, tracks with my internal thinking of the word’s use.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Was just plain fun - as soon as I saw the “fear of long words” I was like of course that’s it

*I mistakenly put “Merriam Webster” the first time around - while MW doesn’t include the word smug itself, the 1.b definition is simply “self-satisfied”

bbor2• 1 month ago

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…

asah• 1 month ago

I used <tab> and <space> and left the mouse hovering over the continue button, and it went very quickly.

deejaaymac• 1 month ago

"what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?"

A lot of them, because being an anti-intellectual is 'cool'

da_grift_shift2• 1 month ago

Unfortunate bullshit asymmetry here. Taking the time to thoughtfully point out inaccuracies in a piece of vibesludge excreted in seconds.

herodoturtle• 1 month ago

“vibesludge”

^_^ hah what a great word, first time seeing it.

Another one I came across recently - “sloptimization”

Muskwalker• 1 month ago

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)

n4r9• 1 month ago

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.

taffydavid2• 1 month ago

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

balazspeczeli• 1 month ago

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?

z2• 1 month ago

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.

camillomiller• 1 month ago

My man, it’s a slippy sloppy app claude coded possibly in an afternoon at best…

mhdhejazi• 1 month ago

One interesting observation: If you’re unsure of the correct answer, select the longest option, and you’re almost always correct!

awinter-py• 1 month ago

I like how it tests whether I know 170k words by requiring me to click on 170k words 3 times each

eps• 1 month ago

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.

kgc• 1 month ago

Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise?

riwsky• 1 month ago

A much better test, which dynamically adjusts difficulty level: https://www.myvocab.info/en

roggenbuck• 1 month ago

The longest answer is the correct answer for a lot of the questions

EtaoinWu• 1 month ago

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.

emil-lp• 1 month ago

Also, every alternative containing a semicolon was the correct one.

da_grift_shift2• 1 month ago

The design is also painfully similar to Duolingo if anyone can spot that.

Yeah. Clocked it from the landing page.

microtherion• 1 month ago

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.

theoneone• 1 month ago

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?

metalman• 1 month ago

whenever I run out of words I know, I make new ones.

lacoolj• 1 month ago

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

ErroneousBosh• 1 month ago

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.

cyberax• 1 month ago

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?

RexM• 1 month ago

At least three

lelanthran2• 1 month ago

Too much time spent on the basics, honestly. I'm at word 20 and still on the basics?

Each word is a double-click.

kzrdude• 1 month ago

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.

lelanthran2• 1 month ago

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.

marcyb5st2• 1 month ago

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

rawgabbit• 1 month ago

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.

billforsternz• 1 month ago

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.

andsoitis• 1 month ago

multiple choice is a cheat. the real test is whether you can define the word without seeing a menu of options to pick from.

bialpio• 1 month ago

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...

dopkew• 1 month ago

Yes. One would want to avoid false positives for the accurate evaluation of one's vocabulary.

adammarples• 1 month ago

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.

NickNaraghi• 1 month ago

Almost every correct answer is a longer string than the other multiple choice options.

spudlyo2• 1 month ago

"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!?

dalanmiller• 1 month ago

Underappreciated comment

snovymgodym• 1 month ago

Learning Latin vocabulary is pretty useful. Latin grammar, not so much.

spudlyo2• 1 month ago

The fun way to learn vocabulary is through extensive reading. Without learning something about grammar, you're stuck learning vocabulary through Anki decks, which is not my idea of a good time.

ChoGGi• 1 month ago

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?

margalabargala4• 1 month ago

Kowtow certainly is. Gaikwar is arguable.

inkyoto• 1 month ago

kowtow (叩頭) is a Cantonese word borrowed into English in the early 19th century.

Groxx• 1 month ago

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.

aetherspawn• 1 month ago

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.

kI3RO• 1 month ago

I bet non-native speakers know more English words.

goodpoint5• 1 month ago

So it seems. Would be lovely to have statistics shown at the end of the quiz.

teo_zero3• 1 month ago

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.

lekevicius• 1 month ago

I'm not a native speaker (Eastern Europe), and my scores are 20, 20, 17, 18, 15 - more aligned to your native speaker model.

teo_zero3• 1 month ago

Oops! I had better revise my theory, then!

oarla• 1 month ago

Not a native speaker and my scores are 20, 19, 19, 20 and 15 for a total of 93.

Maybe I should consider myself as one :)

teo_zero3• 1 month ago

Maybe I should consider myself as one

It depends: do you get its and it's right? :)

apimade• 1 month ago

Pick the longest answer, you’re right 97% of the time.

This is true of any LLM-generated quiz.

Walf• 1 month ago

And it'll be one of the two choices that directly contradict each other.

SpyCoder77• 1 month ago

The UI reminds me of another language-related app...

amatecha• 1 month ago

88/100, scores were 20/20/18/14/16. Born & raised in western Canada fwiw.

alkonaut• 1 month ago

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.

cwnyth• 1 month ago

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.

oceansky• 1 month ago

A couple

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 1 month ago

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.

asparagus8940• 1 month ago

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."

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 1 month ago

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.

widgets• 1 month ago

"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

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 1 month ago

Ok. "Partial" means "unfair". You've cracked the code. My bad.

quickthrowman• 1 month ago

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.

salamo• 1 month ago

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.

Thraway198• 1 month ago

100%!

usernametaken29• 1 month ago

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.

geuis4• 1 month ago

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.

olalonde2• 1 month ago

Keep going. I got the first 80 words correct and only 11 of the last 20 words.

geuis4• 1 month ago

There are no hard words in this puzzle. This is all basic English.

leecoursey• 1 month ago

The correct response for each word is ALMOST always the longest answer.

nekusar• 1 month ago

I got 74,400

You mastered 88 new words!

rcfox• 1 month ago

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

abnry2• 1 month ago

This is where I got the link from.

bjourne• 1 month ago

Why not add keyboard shortcuts? Would make a much more polished desktop experience.

mlinhares• 1 month ago

Needs keyboard support ASAP. Using the mouse for something like this is a waste of time.

poisonfountain• 1 month ago

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.

hamolton• 1 month ago

Please add keyboard controls

getnormality• 1 month ago

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.

throwaway27448• 1 month ago

Would other people define "complacent" as "Smug satisfaction with oneself"? I'm not so sure.

Regardless, this was fun.

ryanar• 1 month ago

yeah I was pretty confused to the answer of that one, I picked it because it was the closest thing that made sense.

uberex• 1 month ago

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.

Dwedit• 1 month ago

Find the pair of antonyms, and the answer will be one of those.

natch• 1 month ago

This is great. I look forward to going through it after some of the suggested tweaks are applied! 100 seems daunting though.

danbrooks• 1 month ago

Super high scores for the community!

I got 83/100 suggesting 60,000.

My SAT reading was 760/800.

zimpenfish• 1 month ago

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"

djmips• 1 month ago

I got 4 wrong but also I was getting weary and I made a couple of bad clicks.

dsenkus• 1 month ago

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"

zoogeny2• 1 month ago

I ran through it twice, first time 91 second time 90, score: 69,500. Midwit confirmed.

abjr• 1 month ago

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.

zoogeny2• 1 month ago

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.

rpcope1• 1 month ago

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.

tonymet• 1 month ago

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

duk3luk3• 1 month ago

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.

WalterBright2• 1 month ago

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.

testemailfordg2• 1 month ago

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

alok-g• 1 month ago

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.

over190bpm• 1 month ago

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.

zeusdclxvi• 1 month ago

I got 84/100 right. Their "Scientific Estimate" was that I know 65,300 words.

jurgenaut23• 1 month ago

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.

Animats2• 1 month ago

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).

firefoxd• 1 month ago

Good thing I read this post this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664

ashton314• 1 month ago

I think that this needs an application of Bayes Rule against the ¼ chance I guessed and got it right by luck.

shevy-java• 1 month ago

I am trying to keep a subset. I don't aim for perfection so knowing all words is rather a pointless exercise in futility.

miqkt• 1 month ago

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.

kuboble• 1 month ago

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

https://wortschi.de/quiz

Liftyee• 1 month ago

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.

tgv• 1 month ago

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.

yugioh3• 1 month ago

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.

brookman64k• 1 month ago

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.

air7• 1 month ago

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.

piekvorst• 1 month ago

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.)

4gotunameagain• 1 month ago

84/100, also English as a second language. Language of choice in technical stuff, mother tongue in abstract and emotional

einpoklum• 1 month ago

"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.

NewEntryHN• 1 month ago

Very easy for French speakers ahah

himata4113• 1 month ago

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.

GolDDranks• 1 month ago

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.

stymaar2• 1 month ago

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.

RugnirViking2• 1 month ago

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.

stymaar2• 1 month ago

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.

gpvos5• 1 month ago

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.

davedx• 1 month ago

66k

londons_explore• 1 month ago

Did the first 25, got all correct, got bored.

It needs some kind of auto adjusting difficulty...

SideburnsOfDoom2• 1 month ago

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.

benob• 1 month ago

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.

cl3misch• 1 month ago

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.

goodpoint5• 1 month ago

It should be adaptive - immediately. Going through the 100 basic words is really tedious.

wazoox2• 1 month ago

81500 for me, but I'm French, and I've often remarked that supposedly "hard words" are just quite ordinary french words.

RugnirViking2• 1 month ago

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)

cs02rm0• 1 month ago

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.

rvba2• 1 month ago

I had a feeling they are testing something else. Around 50% of correct answers were option 1

jan_Sate• 1 month ago

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.

glove24772• 1 month ago

Gemini 3 Flash AI enough to ingore the results

55555• 1 month ago

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.

glove24772• 1 month ago

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.

dreis_sw• 1 month ago

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.

earthpyy2• 1 month ago

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!

mapcars• 1 month ago

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.

Myrmornis• 1 month ago

You don't need to know the words since 3 out of the 4 definitions are silly.

chistev• 1 month ago

My results:

Scientific Estimate 72,650

You mastered 90 new words!

I like this. Nice job!

stirfish• 1 month ago

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.

https://gatherer.wizards.com/UZ/en-us/155/sanguine-guard

megous• 1 month ago

I mean I know all English words, but this test has a problem that most correct answers are the longest ones.

micw• 1 month ago

It misses a "I don't know" button. So it has a 20% false positive by guessing bias built in, right?

zahrevsky• 1 month ago

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.

golol• 1 month ago

Cute, but for strange words clicking the longest explanation turned out to be akmost always rhe correct one :)

ganeshkumar_sr• 1 month ago

The option with more words appears to be the correct answer for each question.

sfupysbsu• 1 month ago

Major flaw in the quiz: you can do great by just picking the longest definition.

donatj• 1 month ago

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.

gumboshoes• 1 month ago

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.

gpvos5• 1 month ago

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).

canpan• 1 month ago

Picking max(len(answer)) is the right choice almost every time at the higher level..

stephbook• 1 month ago

Should use an ELO rating to find your level faster. Slogging through 100 basics is pointless.

timonoko• 1 month ago

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%.

jcd000• 1 month ago

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)

miki123211• 1 month ago

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.

olliepro• 1 month ago

This is the classic pattern of LLM generated MCQs.

iandanforth• 1 month ago

Even though it said ""Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?" it still estimates I know less than half the English vocabulary. Humbling.

stoicfungi• 1 month ago

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.

herczegzsolt• 1 month ago

Desperately needs a skip button for words I don't know.

Jeff9James• 1 month ago

i can't move onto the next one in the quiz

myrandomcomment• 1 month ago

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.

shimonabi• 1 month ago

72k and I made one stupid mistake at "beginner". I'm not a native speaker.

chaz6• 1 month ago

I know at least five.

ssaakaash• 1 month ago

A quirk of LLM generated MCQs is that in the majority of cases, the longest option is the right one.

JohnDSDev• 1 month ago

I just got 72k words, I most definitely do not know that much I just clicked the longest definition for most of them.

rreiner• 1 month ago

Something is wrong with the estimation method -- I got 100/100 words correct (albeit the second time I did the test -- one word I had gotten wrong the first time occurred again), and it estimated my vocabulary at 85000 words. Given the stated methodology, the correct estimate should be 170000.

paduc• 1 month ago

As a French speaker, I think I’m advantaged for the difficult words (which are very often of French/latin origin).

I scored 74 400 and I’m nowhere near English-native.

mppm• 1 month ago

This is cute, but here is the result I got by always clicking the longest answer, or the first one if two seemed equal:

Scientific Estimate: 71,650 words

"Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

Core Basics: 16/20

Intermediate: 15/20

Advanced: 19/20

Expert: 18/20

Grandmaster: 16/20

This is significant beyond this particular app, because biases like this are found all over the place in popular LLM benchmarks.

teleforce• 1 month ago

Fun facts one third of English words are French words [1].

I was once reading a posted notice in French, and can mostly understand it although I don't speak French.

I suspect most of the modern English words are not even Old English. This makes learning English very difficult [2].

In this regard English is very much like C++. Once you know how to use it can becomes a very useful tools and utilities.

[1] Is English just badly pronounced French?

https://youtu.be/TUL29y0vJ8Q

[2] 10 Reasons English is Ridiculously Hard:

https://youtu.be/DrlX-L4o2KM

nashbash• 1 month ago

65.500, you really get for free a lot of less common english vocabulary when your 1st language is a romance language, not sure how scientific/well tuned the test and number is though but it's always fun to check these sort of tests and how they evolve throughout the years

SideburnsOfDoom2• 1 month ago

I would argue that none of "Weltschmerz", "Gaekwar", "Ucalegon" and "Houghmagandy" are really English words, although I already knew 2 of them.

And one of them prevented me from a perfect score, when I guessed wrong.

On the second run-through there was significant overlap. Maybe 30 or 40% of the words were from the first run-through.

luka598• 1 month ago

Whole thingy has one giant problem which is that correct answer is probably the longest one.

First try I noticed it in about the middle of the quiz and got ~65k Second try I selected only the longest and got ~78k

How many of the 170k English words do you know?

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