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.<p>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?).<p>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).<p>They call it scientific and give a hand-wavey formula, but they don't explain how words are stratified in the first place. If stratified sampling is a formally recognized method of doing this, it would be nice to have a link to a real reference. I think I know a lot of words, but I am skeptical of the estimate this app provided (north of 75k).
I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia
For explicit comparison: <i>kinetic</i> and <i>metamorphosis</i> are ~10x as common as <i>breviary</i>, and 10,000x as common as <i>hippo…</i>.<p>See NGRAMs: <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia%2C+metamorphosis%2Ckinetic&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHip...</a>
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)<p>It really could do with a summary showing the answers you made and corrections for what you got wrong.
"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia"<p>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.
The test hardly seems adaptive (if at all) and yet it made the HN front page. That’s impressive.
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…
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?
> what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?<p>95% of Americans.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick (or add an undo button).
> Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick.<p>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.
+1 to all these points especially the first one. I dropped off after about 10 words and didn't have a clear path to move to the next level.
It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.
Level 5 grandmaster was hardcore!
It does get hard enough but only in the very last fraction.<p>Zenzizenzizenzic for example.
If I had to write out the definition, I’d have been screwed. The recursive structure of the word makes it out as a child’s word or something from mathematics. Given where it is in the game, that left one answer out of the four.
> It also doesn't get hard enough<p>Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?
I thought that one was pretty well known. But then, I can also rattle off Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch at will.
The real question is, do you know what it means?
But why?<p>say what you like about antidisestablishmentarianism; at least it's an ethos
Somebody obviously coined the word as a self-referential joke. And somehow it stuck. That makes it memorable.<p>Speaking of things that stick... arachibutyrophobia is the feat of getting peanut putter stuck to the roof of your mouth. (I admit I had to look that one up, as it's not nearly as memorable, though I knew the word existed).
They are Welsh?<p>I too can say it and I'm very English...ish. LlanPG is a tourist attraction and a great example of an amateur advertising idea smashing it!
:D I did better than expected, but I did miss that one. I learned some fun ones.
Based on only missing that one, it figured out. I knew 83,000 words. That seems unsupportable
Lol. Yeah. Non native here but gave up at about 50 words. Too many words, too easy. And my English SUCKS
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.
Also the explanations are too broad.<p>F.e. Frugal - Economical with money or goods<p>I don’t think frugal means economical it means rather over the top …<p>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<p>Ai slop
That definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.
That seems a pretty good definition of 'frugal' to me.
To be excessively frugal would be miserly, tight-fisted or whatever.<p>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.<p>Sometimes it gives one of several possible meanings but that's a valid choice.<p>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.<p>The words I find most interesting are those that convey some subtle nuance, or describe some very specific thing - tools for old crafts, uncommon but genuinely used adjectives and the like. Very few of those appear.
"Frugal" most definitely does not mean "rather over the top" unless that is some new slang meaning I've never heard of.
You can look it up in a dictionary? See, e.g., <a href="https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=frugal" rel="nofollow">https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=fruga...</a>
> Also - too many clicks per word.<p>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.<p>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.
yeah, it should just be click->next;<p>I got tired after 8 words, looked at how many I'm suppose to know and gave up.<p>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.
100 is too many? Thats two or three minutes at most.<p>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.
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.<p>(context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score)<p>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?<p>Their "How is this calculated" page that appears at the end explains their error:<p>> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.<p>> We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:<p>> 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<p>> If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band.<p>> Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)<p>Their strata add up to 85000, not ~170k, making a perfect score still give a 50%.<p>They're also using a pretty limited and perhaps non-difficulty-representative subset of the language.<p>Cute, but wrong on many counts.
Exactly the same feedback: I got all 100 correct, and the results were the same as yours.<p>As it usually happens in this kind of "check your vocabulary" tests in English, being Greek gives you an advantage in higher levels ;-)
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.
What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100
I read a lot, and have since I was a child<p>edit: also, native English (well, American) speaker
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.
It was clearly built with AI.
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.<p>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.<p>Have you found the same to be true?
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.<p>I got credit for a few that I would have happily just missed.
Agreed<p>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<p>I'd also say the toughness should be mixed up a little. The last 30 or so became a slog<p>Cool idea though!
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.
Agreed, there were also a few where I deduced the correct definition by comparing the options.
Yeah, I way overperformed on this test because it was multiple choice. There were 11 words I didn't know at all, and another 8 where I was uncertain to varying degrees. My score of 99/100 does not reflect my actual ability. Even the one I got wrong was a misclick.
Pretty fun.<p>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.<p>Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.
It'd also be a lot less awkward to go through 100 words if it had keyboard shortcuts (1-4 for the words, enter to submit) and if they fixed the layout shift jank
wouldn't even let me tab to sumbit, you had to click, tab through each following option, then to submit, but then you had to tab again to confirm the submission!
It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The distractor answers weren't convincing enough. For starters, when an answer was based on deconstructing the word into common English words, that ruled it out. After all, if it was, then it wouldn't have been obscure.<p>A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions <i>is</i> hard. From the exams I know (excluding those whose nature precludes it, such as based on calculation or rote memorization) the only that does this brutally well is LEK (Polish medical graduate exam). It's nigh impossible to vibe guess it at more than random chance for someone outside the field.
What I also noticed: when there are two contradictory definitions to choose from, it is usually one of those two.<p>For all its shortcomings, this was part of the fun, deducing the likely correct answer when you see a word for the first time.
Yeah I also got exactly 74k. Stuff like “xylologist” I guessed had to do with vegetation because of “xylem”, whereas xylophone player was too on the nose. Then again, maybe knowing xylem in the first place makes 74k reasonable.
Haha. Yeah I figured Xylo- (wood) + sth. related to mono-poly so wood-seller made sense. Never have heard of this word before
I think the test was vibe coded, because a xylologist is someone who studies wood, not someone who sells wood. I am not sure if "xylolgist" was the exact word, though.<p>xylo- = wood; -logy = study<p>Indeed from M-W: "a branch of dendrology dealing with the gross and the minute structure of wood"
Seems to be a hapax legomenon
<a href="https://www.oed.com/dictionary/xylopolist_n" rel="nofollow">https://www.oed.com/dictionary/xylopolist_n</a>
"OED's only evidence for xylopolist is from 1656, in the writing of Thomas Blount, antiquary and lexicographer."
66k for me, but I didn't get that word, instead I got ones like Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Flibbertigibbet, and Brobdingnagian... which the latter two interestingly do show up in my keyboard's word completion suggestions.
Yeah I guessed that one right because xylophone player sounded like a trap.<p>I don't understand how they rank words though, some extremely common words like xenophobia were ranked as high as much more obscure ones.
in casual use you might also be able to guess it from context, so i think it’s a wash
> A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard.<p>In case of online quiz you can have a "competition" between distractors:<p>1. start by having much more distractors than needed and pick randomly<p>2. for each measure the probability of it getting clicked (clicks/times it's shown)<p>3. show the most frequently clicked distractors more often
Indeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!
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.
> I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so.<p>Having an answer counted as incorrect, just because I've accidentally touched the screen of the phone? I would absolutely hate that.
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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>The design is also painfully similar to Duolingo if anyone can spot that.
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.<p>Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.<p>Like for me most of more complex words been adjectives with few nouns. And in many cases you can just see 2/4 or 3/4 definitions are not for adjective.
I feel like it make sense to just mix up definitions of different adjectives if it's adjective you looking at. With just little filtering to make sure you don't see repeatative definition options in different test words.
> Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.<p>Yes, exactly like this.
Interesting that this showed up here now. I did it a week ago after hearing about it on The Rest Is Science. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw</a>
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
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.<p>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.
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.
> It seems like the right answer is usually the longest of the choices<p>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):<p><pre><code> 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)</code></pre>
Also surprisingly mostly the forst or last option (might be bias)
Hahahhaha i got 62k points by just choosing the longest definitions. Great observation!
Got 59,800, Performance Breakdown:<p>Core Basics 19/20<p>Intermediate 17/20<p>Advanced 19/20<p>Expert 14/20<p>Grandmaster 12/20<p>I guess, it's not too bad for a non-native speaker.<p>Minor feedback:<p>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:<p>a. it makes guessing too easy<p>b. it basically becomes a circular definition which is meaningless<p>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.
An alternative algorithm which would probably converge faster than 100 questions would be something like Elo or Glicko 2.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Suggestion: Add an "I don't know" button. If I don't know a word, I can admit it - but if I have to guess, then I have a 1/4 chance of getting incorrect credit.
The chances are actually often way better than 1/4. For the words I didn't know, I was almost always able to exclude one or two options. Sometimes even three, finding the solution by exclusion.
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).<p>My shorter OED contains 163,000 words (compared to the 600,000 words of the longer).<p>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.<p>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.<p>I forgot what that was now, but it was a fun experiment.
I also got something around 70-80k with 95/100 correct words (I don't know or use most of these words, but the later sections have a lot of words with Greek or Latin origin, which made them easy to guess). One of my wrong words was a misclick in the first section, which I think dragged down the estimate quite a lot. You may have done something similar. I assume they use a simple formula where early misses cost you a lot and late misses cost you very little.
Neat way to validate.<p>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.<p>I comment on the related aspects here.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599769">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599769</a>
can't assume gaussian underlying distribution of the word-knowing, it's known zipfian. so you can't be doing anovas or anything of that nature because if you look up zipfian distribution's variance, you get Nature and Reality giving you the middle finger
I think you mean it's lognormal, at least if we're discussing native English speakers or comparing those with similar amounts of exposure to the language.<p>(The median English speaker almost certainly knows several thousand words, or word stems to avoid duplication. But the number who know all words in the tail is exceptionally small.)
No way is vocab size zipfian. Word counts from a corpus follow zipf's law, but not vocab sizes themselves.<p>Otherwise the most common vocab size would be equal to one.
Not to mention, N=1
I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.
"Defenestrate" was not in my list, but it's a word I would have gotten, as I know it from: (1) An A.C. Clarke short story ("The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch", in "Tales from the White Hart", if I remember correctly); and (2) The Defenstration of Prague (I have visited Prague Castle - there were apparently multiple defenestrations there). It's an interestingly (amusingly?) macabre word. (It also helps that I know high-school French and German plus understand Swedish as being very close to Norwegian.)
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.
Interesting. I didn’t have defenestrate in mine - I’d assumed they used the same word list.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Is this of any use? I doubt so, but it was fun.<p>P.S. of course a more reliable clue of nativeness is the use of "its" and "it's" interchangeably, a mistake EFL learners wouldn't do.
I'm not a native speaker (Eastern Europe), and my scores are 20, 20, 17, 18, 15 - more aligned to your native speaker model.
Not a native speaker and my scores are 20, 19, 19, 20 and 15 for a total of 93.<p>Maybe I should consider myself as one :)
Feature request: fewer clicks. It should be one click per question
I'd suggest a "toast" would suffice for the correct answers. Proceed to the next question when correct, with a "next" button when incorrect.
Keyboard shortcuts would be nice as well. When I saw it was 100 questions I bailed.
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).<p>But then below it said "you are a man of few words".<p>I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.
Maybe "few words" means your larger vocabulary lets you use a single word to represent a concept that someone else would need several words to say. But the conversation ends up longer when the other person asks you to define the obscure word you just used.
Combined with the factoid it features under "how is this calculated":<p><pre><code> However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words.
</code></pre>
We must be geniuses, lol.
That tracks. Active vocabulary means the set of words that someone knows well enough to actually use in their speech or writing.<p>That's always going to be smaller than the set of words for which a person can choose the correct definition out of four options.
For sure there is a bit of selection bias with hackernews users. Not saying we are all geniuses, but I strongly believe we are, at least, more educated than your average Joe
There are words that I know from this quiz that I would never use in real life or in my writings. I’m not sure why. That’s the active vocabulary distinction.
You are almost always going to find people with above average reading and writing skills on an online forum - especially one with such "curated" audience and spartan UI.
> stephen fry<p>"May I compartmentalise? I hate to, but may I? may I?"<p>"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers"<p>"...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"<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg</a> (fantastic sketch!)
><i>Required Reading</i><p>><i>Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.</i><p>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).<p>Any other dictionary-completionists in here? Regardless of size - I'm fairly sure mine was rather small, though not a pocket-sized one.
"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!?
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
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.<p>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
These should maybe be checked through. Many are the second or third definitions, and some even reference the word in the definition e.g Lethargic: exhibiting lethargy
A much better test, which dynamically adjusts difficulty level: <a href="https://www.myvocab.info/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.myvocab.info/en</a>
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.
I got 68,900 words, with the vast majority of the errors being on the grandmaster level.<p>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.
Stuck it out to the end against my better judgement. Got 89/100 due to difficulties at the "Grandmaster" stage (12/20).<p>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.
It's hilarious that most of these words are French
English has this weird dichotomy where most of the words in a typical sentence are Germanic, while most of the words in the dictionary are French.<p>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
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.<p>A lot of the more common and simpler words are Germanic, as is the grammar (e.g. compound words like cupboard).
Depends is bratwurst a German word or an English one? You will hard pressed to find an American that doesn’t know thr word and what it means. You can buy them at just about any grocery store and they are a staple of many restaurants.<p>At some point the word becomes both. Sourced from its mother language and maybe even still meaning the same thing in both, but no less an English word than any other at this point.
Bratwurst is still a German word. It doesn't become English just because it's used by native English speakers. If you start to tweak it a bit, it could become an English word. Like "fish" vs. "Fisch" in German. Or "good" vs. "gut" in German.
It also had "weltschmerz" in the list, but I think I have only ever heard "ennui" used in English. They are both foreign words, but I would not have thought of weltschmerz as a loan word. Then again, maybe I am not reading the right texts.
They are not. Quite a few have Latin roots and the like that corresponding French words share.
French english speakers usually have a quite good vocabulary. Getting to the point of speaking english is a milestone that's quite difficult for french speakers though.
English is the PHP of human languages.
English also has a ridiculously high fraction of Latin too.
Why not add keyboard shortcuts? Would make a much more polished desktop experience.
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.<p>So it’s not a test of how many words you know but how good you are at guessing what words mean.
The longest answer choice is correct 80%+ of the time, when it should be closer to 25%. I was able to breeze through unfamiliar words just by picking the longest option every time…
The correct response for each word is ALMOST always the longest answer.
This is rather like SAT from 35 years ago.<p>Same strategies apply for guessing the unknown especially with a modicum(it was on the test!) of Latin knowledge..<p>Strange that pretty every one here is getting 70k estimates (93/100 for me).<p>Feels a bit high at least for me as a non-native speaker.<p>I got 2 words I knew wrong, and guessed about 5 unknown words correctly. Those were bizarre repetitive words I've never seen before.<p>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.
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...
Pick the longest answer, you’re right 97% of the time.<p>This is true of any LLM-generated quiz.
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.
there's also <a href="https://www.myvocab.info/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.myvocab.info/en</a><p>From what I can tell they actually have a bit more robust science behind their algorithm (and a lot less questions to answer)
This one's much better. Shorter, faster, adapts to one's level, gives an out for being unsure, largely doesn't bother with definitions (except the occasional verification challenge), and even mixes in some fake words to ensure you're not BS-ing.
There are no hard words in this puzzle. This is all basic English.
There is a typo in "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," it should be "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia" instead. (Also, it breaks the layout.)
Ah, that explains why I got it wrong.
I kind of like how it breaks the layout, since it's such a ridiculous word
Let the ironic screaming at the sight of this word commence!
also interrobang is rendered as bang-interro (!?) when it should be interro (?) then bang (!) -> (?!)
There isn't a "correct" way to incorrectly render the interrobang as 2 separate characters. The name was never supposed to suggest a certain ordering instead of just being both at the same time. The name "interrobang" just sounded better than "exclamaquest" (or any of the alternatives Type Talks readers submitted).
No, it should be rendered with the proper Unicode: U+203D ‽
do you really think so?!<p>I think bang-interro just didn't sound as nice and that's probably why it is called an interrobang.
I bet that "p" just bounced out of pure spite.
[dead]
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.<p>I do wonder how much of these were “what AI thinks are hard words to know” vs. actually hard to know.
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.
84 total, with this breakdown:
Core Basics 19/20
Intermediate 20/20
Advanced 13/20
Expert 15/20
Grandmaster 17/20<p>Scientific Estimate: 69 100 word<p>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.<p>A fun idea!
81k - which is interesting, because last time I did something similar, about 20y back, it was 50k. I'm not sure if I've improved.
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.<p>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.<p>Also I found that some of the definitions were not completely correct.
Yarborough is _also_ an English town so I should have got one more
I flubbed a couple advanced/master and half of grandmaster, eh good enough.<p>Be fun to start at Master and up, but is kerfuffle really grandmaster?<p>Gaikwar and Kowtow are English words?
69,250 (91/100) - I think being French helped a lot for the most complex words, as they're basically the same!
Haha, just pick the longest option and it will be right 90% of the time.<p>I used to do this in school tests too.
This was fun! And it told me I know 55k words which made me a little happy.<p>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:<p>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%.
88/100, scores were 20/20/18/14/16. Born & raised in western Canada fwiw.
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.
"77,250words
"Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"<p>I do concur that a refined collection of incorrect proposed responses which includes selections among terms with semantic proximity, conflated synonyms and plausible morphology could refine the accuracy of evaluations; and if the test was intended to bestow authentic assessments of lexicographical capability this would in all probability become an efficacious approach, but as a simply presentable quiz for folks with sesquipedalian proclivities I was not unduly discomfited by anything moreso than the extraneous clicks leading to and following the display of dichotomous determinations.
God, I loathee the use of "moreso" as a synonym for "more" (rather than as "having the previously-mentioned property to a greater degree"). I'm convinced it's a hypercorrection by people who want to sound educated without actually thinking about the meaning of the words they use.<p><a href="https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211458/more-so-or-moreso" rel="nofollow">https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211458/more-so-o...</a>
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.<p>I'd say I know 10 000 words tops.
You may know more words than you think, many are shared with French
and other Romance languages, particularly the more esoteric ones (see what I did there?). Taking another recherché example: palimpsest - very similar in English, French, Greek.
UX suggestion to make going thought this much faster:<p>1. Frame each option with one key (1,2,3,4). User press 2, select the second option<p>2. Let the user change options if they want until they press Enter. Enter submits the answer.<p>3. Once submitted, another Enter brings the next one
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.
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?
multiple choice is a cheat. the real test is whether you can define the word without seeing a menu of options to pick from.
This dearly needs a "Don't know" or a "Skip" option.<p>Also, as others have said, mixing easy and difficult words would make the process less boring.
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!<p>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.
Cool idea, am working through.<p>It's annoying that you need to click 3 times per question, and the buttons are in 2 different places.<p>Maybe would be better to just let me click the answer I want and then instantly show me the next question?<p>Also who is Sandi?
Sandi Toksvig, the current host of the BBC program QI (Quite Interesting), previously hosted by Stephen Fry. She's also been on a number of other BBC TV and radio shows.
I suspect Sandi Toksvig, one of the hosts of QI. One of the 'success' messages is "quite interestng!".<p>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.
In addition to how much fun it was, it has potential pedagogic value for teaching sampling based estimation.<p>It would have paired well with an exposition of vanilla Monte Carlo and the benefits of stratified sampling.<p>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.
71050, not bad for a non native speaker I guess. I missed 9/100.<p>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.
This was fun! The progression seems logical.<p>I scored 71,000.
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.
Too much time spent on the basics, honestly. I'm at word 20 and still on the basics?<p>Each word is a double-click.
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.
Not native English speaker (Norwegian), score: 55500.<p>But many of the hard words were quite similar to more common words we have here.
Almost every correct answer is a longer string than the other multiple choice options.
Fun game! I did worse than many others here, only 69.9k estimated words. But then English is my second language, so I'm pretty pleased with the result!
I wish it had keyboard shortcuts, it's a bit of a sludge to click through twice.<p>Got 64,650: 20/19/17/18/12 (the intermediate one was a dumb mistake)
Fun idea, I've been wanting to create something similar to track which vocab words I have mastered. Two nits: (1) no need for a "check" button as other commenters have noted and (2) the UI jitters a bit when submitting answers for each question - it's a bit disorienting!
I like how it tests whether I know 170k words by requiring me to click on 170k words 3 times each
Really interesting, but I would love to be able to express honestly when I just guessed. This way the result would be much more scientifically sound. Four answers have a 25% chance of random correctness, which is a bit high in my opinion. I think either adding a "I don't know" or a confidence level (Known/educated guess/wild guess) would help.
Got a bit boring then suddenly very hard with some really esoteric words at the end in the ‘grandmaster’ level. It’d be nice if it got progressively harder without levels.<p>Some definitions were not great and alternatives a little silly at times but on the whole seemed pretty accurate.<p>Also probably needs calibrated as 96/100 was projected to 77k words, what would the estimate be for 100/100?
“You mastered 98 new words!
THE VERDICT<p>You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing.”<p>—-
This sounds more like a cute assessment of only getting <i>two</i> 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.
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...<p>It told me to read the dictionary.
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?
Was excited to take the test, even at 100 words, until I realized I had to manually click every input.<p>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.
I bet non-native speakers know more English words.
I wish the option was just “yes I know this word” or “no I don’t”. Reading the definitions takes too long for so many words
A different interaction design is used by <a href="https://testyourvocab.com" rel="nofollow">https://testyourvocab.com</a> : 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: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210724115604/http://testyourvocab.com/blog.php" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20210724115604/http://testyourvo...</a><p>The two tests give me widely different results, probably because the sampled words aren't perfectly representative and so the results should have huge error bars to account for this sampling error.
I (native American English speaker, college prep school educated) had 5 words that I <i>thought</i> I knew, but still got wrong:<p>obsequious<p>laconic<p>sanguine<p>quotidian<p>enervate<p>On the other hand, I was able to correctly guess these words that I'd never seen before:<p>omphaloskepsis<p>crepuscular<p>absquatulate<p>callipygian<p>houghmagandy<p>quire<p>And then there were these, which were just totally foreign to me:<p>hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia<p>nudiustertian<p>ergophobia<p>tittynope<p>Final estimate: ~73000 words
I got 74,400<p>You mastered 88 new words!
The longest answer is the correct answer for a lot of the questions
Some of the definitions offered are slightly short of what I expect. Like for "Obsequious" it offers "obedient to an excessive or servile degree" which isn't wrong, but it misses the expression of a sort of noisy eagerness in that servility.
Yeah, some definitions are super weird or overly specific, like ‘yield’ > ‘a specific amount of agricultural produce’ (iirc, ymmv)
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 <i>really</i> obscure.<p>One suggestion would be more convincing decoy choices, some were pretty silly. But I have no idea how they come up with them.
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.
My native language Spanish, it actually helps with words like tergiversate, got 55,900.
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.
The UX is awful - I bailed out at 25/100 JUST IN LEVEL ONE (BASICS)<p>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...
I got an estimate of 70,550, from a score of 87/100 (20/18/16/17/16). Not native English speaker.<p>I suppose the words must be weighed, because other people in the thread with more correct words got a not much higher estimate.
There's no need to suppose:<p>From the website with just one more click - like one more wafer thin mint.<p><snip>
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.<p>However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words.
The Algorithm<p>We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:<p><pre><code> 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
</code></pre>
Calculation<p>"If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band."<p>Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)
</clip>
Strange. I got a lower estimate despite getting more correct than you and getting more grandmaster words.<p>Admittedly I had to guess several. It’s kind of an etymological deduction and estimation game at times.
I notice that the concept related to the right answer sometimes has an opposite counterpart.
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.<p>Also add a keyboard focus state on the continue button.
70k, which I believe is a fine result for a second language.
apparently 54,000. Seems like it is including even fictional words though in this test (like from fiction novels). Ironically I scored higher on the expert words (18/20) than the "advanced" words (11/20)
plenty of words and phrases originate from fiction<p>quixotic, scrooge, shangri-la, Uncle Tom, gargantuan, kafkaesque, blurb, milquetoast<p>and words like cyberspace were first used in fiction<p>once real people use them, they stop being fictional words
The word was "Brobdingnagian", which apparently means "giant", from the book, Brobdingnag, published in the <i>1700s</i>. 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.
I don't know that one, but I do know gargantuan, and pantagruelian, which come from a 17th century novel by Rabelais as well as yahoo and Lilliputian, which come from a 1726 novel by Swift.
Kafkaesque doesn’t originate directly from fiction like your other examples any more than a word like Dickensian does.
I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.
Yeah I got 75k~ and did something similar ... most of the expert and grandmaster ones had at least 1 or 2 obvious incorrect answers, then it was a 50/50 so I usually went for the thing that sounded either closer to the root of the word or completely left-field<p>Anything up to expert was obvious
Also, just pick the longest answer :)
76250, or 93/100. Native English speaker from London. Some of the last 10 words were seriously obscure.<p>Are accoutrement and ziggurat really English words? Accoutrement is even pronounced as French!
Those are both on the list of words I thought should have been in a category or two lower because I consider them both sufficiently widely used.
Weirdly enough, these words would be known to some non-native speakers as they show up every now and then in video games.
Depending on what you consider an "English" word, anywhere from 0% to 100% of words are English words. I've definitely seen accoutrement and ziggurat in English, and quite often.
Of course, the line is very blurry. I've used accoutrement(s) in English many times, but I've never considered myself to be speaking English when I use it. It's like joie de vivre or c'est la vie.
What about "rendezvous", or "etiquette", or "RSVP", cliche, nuance, etc? Do you consider those French or English?<p>As you say, the line is very very blurry.
My favorite in the vicinity of etiquette and rendezvous is the "double entendre", very French sounding, but not French at all. That and something being not a person's "forte" which when correctly pronounced is just fort, but through confabulation with a musical term from Italian; forte: to play loudly, sounds more French to English speakers when mispronounced. C'est la vie.<p>Japanese loanwords really tickle my humour; バイト "Baito" : a casual, part-time, non-serious job. From the German
"Arbeit" which is serious, macro-level employment or exertion.
Rendezvous and cliche yes. Nuance, etiquette, RSVP no. It's instinctive so I can't explain but maybe because rendezvous and cliche require using French pronounciation. On this I think you could find more differing opinions than there are possible answers.
This is something that could be done for other languages, word lists are easy.<p>I’m not sure how you’d gauge what knowing each word would indicate.<p>Also adequate options, that sound plausible.
> You know 60000 words, that’s not a lot, go back to reading the dictionary<p>Goes to the about section: an average native speaker knows 35000 words.<p>Ah yes, the classic British insult, should have known it.
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?).<p>And it didn't even tell me at the end how many words I know!<p>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.
Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise?
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.
Some felt too easily guessable. Too many joke answers maybe?
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
I enjoyed some of the incorrect options. For "Debilitate" one of the options was "Remove a bill from the tab".
100%!
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.<p>"Verbose," for instance, is defined as "Using more words than are needed."<p>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.<p>"More words than are needed" could be as limited as "used a three-word construction in a sentence where it could have been one."<p>There are many more like this.<p>Please, I beg all of you - don't use LLMs to generate linguistic slop that claims to be linguistic education.<p>I weep for the world that is to come.
I had no idea there was an English word specifically to describe throwing someone out of a window. Defenestrate.
81,250
97/100 without being a native speaker. Although truth be told only because I figured out how to guess well.
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<p>Fun!
Scientific Estimate: 36,250. Nah, I'm far worse.<p>Probably not too bad for a person whose native language is not English.
Getting "Obfuscate" as #99 and "Quixotic" as #100 made me feel exorbitantly smart.
why use many word when few word do trick
Nice tool - would love it if I could press a number on the keyboard to select and rapidly move through them.
Only got 63,150 words. Considering English is the 3rd language I learned, I think I did pretty well.
Love it, thanks for sharing!
This was my result. I am clueless who Stephen Fry is.<p>SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE
74,000
words
"Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"<p>You mastered 93 new words!
THE VERDICT<p>You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing.
REQUIRED READING<p>Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.
They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha.<p>Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". <i>Fair</i> 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". <i>Partial</i> means to favor one side or the other.<p>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.
Apparently I know 70,000 words... I got 90 out of 100 and it thinks I'm Stephen Fry!
A couple
Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise :D<p>My score: 78,000 words, 20/20/19/18/18.
78,250 is way more than I expected. I sure don't feel like I know 78,000 words.
79k. Missed three from the last group: Vagitus, Yarborough, and Quire.
i remember of such a link in July 2011 but i could only find that one which is a bit different<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806377">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806377</a>
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.
Lethargic had an option "having the quality of lethargy".
That sounds like a good application of Item Response Theory (IRT).
At least three
Nice. I want one in Spanish so I can compare results.
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.
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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The initial section is way too long. Perhaps do an exponential difficulty increase?<p>I got 93 words (not a native speaker), but the expert/grandmaster words were kinda easy?
> You mastered 100 new words!<p>No, I read about 97 words I already knew and guessed at a couple of made-up ones like "snollygoster".<p>Is this what passes for an advanced vocabulary in the US?<p>Also, it took far too many clicks per word, pretty tedious stuff.
That was a nice diversion.
I got 76,750.
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.
70,900<p>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)<p>Was really hard to stop once started lol
WAY too many clicks per word. One, max.<p>The green button (which should not exist) was also hidden under Firefox for Android's address bar until I tried to "scroll* to hide it.
76
The four options were generally:<p>* Correct word
* Opposite definition
* Another word's definition
* Opposite of that word's definition<p>Which massively reduces the difficulty
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.
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.
The UI reminds me of another language-related app...
whenever I run out of words I know, I make new ones.
I got 75,150
when you don’t know the right answer is always the longest one…
The triple click is annoying.<p>I mean, select the word, then press check, then press continue.<p>It could be one single click and move to the next, show me my last result at the same time you ask me for the next one.
I 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?
I was doing well until I got to grandmaster.<p>Then I was doing poorly in grandmaster, until I realize you can ace grandmaster by just picking the longest explanation every time.
Cool concept. but...<p>Vibe coders need to be forced to spend one day learning basic CSS before they're allowed to use an LLM to make a website and the internet would be a lot more pleasant as we move forward with slopification.. It doesn't have to be sloppy, and doesn't take all that much studying to at least be able to steer an llm in the right direction to make something look nice. At this point everything is just the same 3 colors and a centered flex column with weird spacing.
this is a test for willingness to put up with the whole 100. It says something.<p>3 clicks per is what gives it away. and the little compliments. and that it's 100 questions
67900<p>English is not my native language. I get my vocabulary from browsing the Internet. There is no way I know that many words.
> "Yield: Produce or provide a natural product"<p>Eh?
Meh. The UX should be able to simply have the selection indicate it is the choice rather than having to submit it too. It's too cumbersome to click through...
I know maybe 20-30. I'm aware of maybe a few thousand.<p>I use the language to understand not get an effect
Interesting, I don't have the time to go through 100 though and having to click on answer and then mouse down to continue is a slog.
Fun fact: there's a test you can do called wordsum which correlates extremely highly, like .71, to IQ. It's just asking you 10 vocabulary questions. It turns out knowing advanced vocabulary correlates really well to IQ.
It marked this definition for “Candid” as incorrect.
“Secretive and very guarded”<p>But Candid can certainly mean secretive, as in “Candid camera”.
Candid does not mean "secretive and very guarded", though. People misunderstand the meaning of candid camera and assume it means "secret camera" and so use it that way, but that hasn't reached a level of misuse to redefine the meaning of candid.
Got tripped up by "candid" as well. Have always thought it meant furtive or surreptitious. Well, it's never too late to learn.
Surely it’s called Candid Camera specifically because it reveals something that would otherwise be hidden?
It is incorrect.
I thought it’s candid because the subjects’ reactions are honest, unrehearsed.
Yeah it is confusing me because in all cases the camera was hidden. I just think the definitions they give should be clearcut. There may be a case for saying that the way that word functions "in real life" is a bit different than the textbook definition, in some cases.
Typically "candid" in photography means something like spontaneous and unposed (and therefore capturing something honest about the subject rather than unrehearsed). It doesn't imply that the camera is hidden, they just hid it in the TV show to make it easier to get those kinds of shots.
It is, candid definitely does not mean secretive
Uh, no.