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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#61

Post by natural219 »

19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even my age group, let alone the general populace (I'm 20).

That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm not familiar with. Most of the ones I missed are words I recognize from this series, although since I'm not 100% sure of them, so I left them unchecked.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#62

Post by mortenjorck »

The psychology of these things is interesting to me. My reflexive reaction was, of course, "I have to know!" and then my immediate counter-reaction was "This is just intellectual phallometry and is ultimately of no consequence to me."

Of course, I very quickly rationalized away the counter-reaction and took the test anyway, and then considered sharing it with my friends. What drives this?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#63

Post by onan_barbarian »

johnfn wrote: post #37
diN0bot wrote: post #32

lots of people here are saying they scored lower than what they expected, and that maybe other people cheated. that could be it, but it could also be that hacker news folks tend to be overconfident. this would match the stereotype of this group being mainly male nerd entreprenuers, which could score worse on things like this but perceive themselves to score much higher (a feeling not a fact backed by studies that i c…

I got just under the median on this test, but I scored around the 99th percentile in the SAT verbal, and I feel it's reasonable to say the two test approximately the same things. It seems unlikely that I've slipped so far in just two years :) I never really considered Hacker News to be full of overconfident people. If anything, to me being part of HN is a humbling experience. It reminds me that there are so many peop…

Hacker News is _very_ full of over-confident people, believe me.

During a discussion of 'whether open source contributions were being overly important to job seekers' a while back, a surprising number of HN commenters automatically put themselves in the role of employer, peering dubiously over their glasses at me. Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified to be taking on that kind of role with respect to anyone.

I don't think SAT verbal is nearly as intensely focused on obscure vocab. I didn't do it, but did do a GRE verbal back in 1994 to get into grad school. For what it's worth, my score on this and my GRE verbal were quite consistent.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#64

Post by wisty »

lftl wrote: post #52
johnfn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got just under the median on this test, but I scored around the 99th percentile in the SAT verbal, and I feel it's reasonable to say the two test approximately the same things. It seems unlikely that I've slipped so far in just two years :) I never really considered Hacker News to be full of overconfident people. If anything, to me being part of HN is a humbling experience. It reminds me that there are so many peop…

I'm pretty much in the same boat. This scored me below median, but I scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT verbal as well (although that was a decade ago for me). I think one contributing factor is the structure of the questions. If you ask me if I KNOW at least one definition for the word mawkish for example, I'll choose no I don't know a definition of it. I do however have a good enough feel for the word, that I…

Yeah, on the more difficult words, it becomes a test of your ability to tell yourself you know what they mean.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#65

Post by AdamTReineke »

natural219 wrote: post #61

19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even my age group , let alone the general populace (I'm 20). That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm n…

I'm 22 came in at 19.5k. I guess I need to use the dictionary in my Kindle a lot more.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#67

Post by The_Fox »

natural219 wrote: post #61

19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even my age group , let alone the general populace (I'm 20). That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm n…

Perhaps the results of this test don't predict academic success very well. I graduated at the top of my program (of about 30 graduates) last year and scored only 20.5k.

Maybe I fell behind my peers by only reading comp sci, math, business, and communications related stuff for 4 years. Guess I've got some catching up to do.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#68

Post by Hello_sup »

blntechie wrote: post #34

Think I have the lowest score here. 16,400 words. English is not my native language but I speak English daily and I wouldn't say my English is bad. Pretty disappointed with the score and also surprised the median is way way higher than I expected. Edit: And, also to add, I followed 2 criteria for whether I know the word or not. 1. What's the absolute definition? 2. And can I find the equivalent or meaning of it in my…

The lowest on this site has less than 14k words (guess how I reached this conclusion).
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