I was honest and was shocked by my result being in the bottom third! I have an IQ > 125! I think I need to read more.
Estimate your English vocabulary size
41–50 of 331 posts
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#42I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off.
When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I dismiss most options because they're much too obscure.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#43Just as a test, ticking all the boxes scores 45,000 words. Which seems to indicate that they haven't seeded the quiz with fake words to weed out cheaters : Pity, since there was an opportunity to unbias it in at least one dimension. (I also tried deselecting just 1 of a few of the really tough words : Each one caused the score to lower).
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#44I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked…
They could also test you on some of the less-recognized words you selected to help identify cheating.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#45I only checked words that I can use in a sentence: left one blank on the first set, a handful blank on the second set.
42,500 (http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216)
Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#46I got 17,200. I'm 22 with a Bachelor's degree and I was pretty surprised with how low I scored. Anyone in a similar category?
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#47[deleted]
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#48I only checked words that I can use in a sentence: left one blank on the first set, a handful blank on the second set. 42,500 ( http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216 ) Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." -- Dorothy Parker
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#49lampoon: verb: Publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule or sarcasm.
I knew lampoon had something to do with criticism, so I checked the box, but I had no idea that the definition specified a public context. Does that mean I didn't know the word?
I suspect a problem with the test is that it's easy to know enough to figure out the gist of a word's definition without having any knowledge of the specificity of the definition, if that makes any sense.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#50Don't care too much for percentile and age stats at the end.. clearly doesn't represent general pop.
What IS interesting tho, from a language learners perspective, is the vocab size estimation. A metric a lot of us use as a rough benchmark of vocab needed for fluency in a foreign language is 10,000words. Comparing this with what an educated adult native speaker knows in their own language (using my own truthful score of 24k) is pretty interesting.
Would love to have something like this to quickly gauge my vocab in other languages!