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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#91

Post by evandijk70 »

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…

This makes me feel a lot better about my 15500 as someone from Holland who has been studying in England for 4 months.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#92

Post by sanxiyn »

Learning to program did help. I could check "shard" and "bloat", which are apparently quite rare in general context compared to words I know.

How about you? Were there words you could check because you encountered it often in programming context?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#93

Post by Willwhatley »

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…

Howdy,

I scored a little over 40k on this, and did well on other verbal tests for the general population when I was still taking tests.

I attribute much of my facility to 1)reading fantasy and 2)looking up words I don't know. Since I loathe interrupting the flow of a story, I read with a pencil and make a list of words to batch learning later.

Best,

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#95

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

That's possible, even likely. Another explanation would be that tests like this tend to be biased towards people with very evenly distributed interests, preferrably with a literary, classical bias or background. Someone who knows 10,000 words from one or two specialzed disciplines will always score worse than someone who diligently read through all the high school text books and topped it off with some gutenberg.org.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#96

Post by astrofinch »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #63
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…

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…

"Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified to be taking on that kind of role with respect to anyone."

You inferred this based on user profiles?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#97

Post by paulnelligan »

soundsop wrote: post #44
Eliezer wrote: post #29

I 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.

OR they could actually make it a REAL test, e.g. multiple choice

I scored far lower than I would have expected, which although it hurts my ego a bit, I can easily dismiss because of the nature of this test.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#99

Post by burgerbrain »

davidw wrote: post #85
burgerbrain wrote: post #39

22,000 Clearly my American public school education has served me well. >_<

No one getting high scores did so because of or despite their education. They did it by having the sort of brain that happens to retains words like uxoricide and reading copious quantities of material in which such abstruse words are employed. I got a high score and went to public schools in the US, and didn't finish college either.

A proper (classical) education is generally widely accepted to have a dramatic positive influence on ones vocabulary.
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