Estimate your English vocabulary size • Hacker News Board

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#251

Post by bermanoid » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 6:11 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #219

mdda wrote: post #43

Just 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).

Site creator here -- you're right, there's no cheating detection. I ask people not to fill out the survey results if they're not being entirely truthful, of course they are free to disregard the instructions. But I created the site, less interested in absolute vocabulary size numbers (these vary widely depending upon methodology), and more in relative changes among age groups, SAT scores, etc. And hopefully, cheating…

I'm really, really hoping that you're logging referrer data along with scores - if you're not already, you might consider starting. Even if this is not a source of proper scientific data, it would be highly interesting to see how, for instance, the Reddit referrals do vs. HN vs. Facebook, etc. We can probably all make some fairly accurate guesses about where the high and low performers would come from, but I'd be real curious to see the exact breakdowns.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#252

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 6:31 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #245

robert-boehnke wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the quality of the result is highly dependent on the honesty of the person tested, but with multiple choice, wouldn't you be able to deduct the meaning of the word from choices you are given? E.g.: One of the words I encountered in the test was 'terpsichorean'. While I knew that Terpsichore is one of the Muses, I did not know which one and left the box unticked. Had there been multiple choices, I might h…

I ticked 'terpsichorean', because it made me think "dreamy travelogue writing of a scenic beach with either terpsichorean sky or sea, it means X looks a pale shade of blue-green". Google tells me it means dancing so I was way way off (maybe conflating turquoise and cerulean?). But I have no way of knowing how many words that I feel comfortable defining are actually nowhere near correct, so to be any kind of accurate,…

I had "discomfit" as one of my words that I wasn't clear of the definition of, I was pretty close when I looked it up but couldn’t have guaranteed it. It's probably easily confused with discomfort ... which made me think that this needs to be a little more tested. Commonly misread words could easily inflate scores.

However, I think a multiple choice test could also inflate scores unless the definitions were very cunningly constructed.

I scored 75-80th percentile (32,800) which surprised me. It seems quite a lot of words, for one. For another I consider my vocab' to be very good and I don't think I'm being bigheaded in that. Ergo I expected to be ranked higher.

On the second page there was an entire column of words of which I recognised only three sufficiently to provide a guaranteed accurate definition. One of that column was terpischorean, another tatterdemalion.

Whilst looking up tatterdemalion I found little use of it after the 1930s except as a proper noun (a Marvel Comics character for example). What I did find however is that Google Books is useless for finding dates. One citation from an author Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton is given a date of 1999. That's a reprint date, the author died in the 19th century.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#253

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 6:35 PM UTC

swehner wrote: post #130

cduan wrote: post #81

I didn't see any science-related words when I took the test. Not sure if this is because of the process by which they made the word lists, or because there truly are not many common science-related words.

At http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample they explain how they chose the words the test is based on: Quote: Too limited. Words that are specifically American or British (in meaning or spelling), or slang, or scientific/medical, or anything labeled archaic, or anything else that isn't part of broad, general English. Also, no animals or ingredients, which depend too much on where you live.

>or anything else that isn't part of broad, general English

So scientific words aren't general English? This suggests that the authors don't think anyone ever talks about science?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#254

Post by georgieporgie » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 6:47 PM UTC

marcinw wrote: post #232

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 must admit, as an American male, a little older than you, my score was also so low, I'm too embarrassed to even mention. All those years of cheating on vocabulary tests (merely by memorizing the words 5 minutes prior to taking the test) in high school did not help. It's one of the those things I look back on in life and regret. Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to catch up ? edit: forgot to mention, while I…

Read a lot. In fact, buy a Kindle and read a lot. It has a built-in dictionary which is quite decent, and you'll actually look up words that you would otherwise skim past with a mediocre context-based understanding.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#255

Post by georgieporgie » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 6:48 PM UTC

I scored a mere 25,700-something. Based upon my ability to regularly, inadvertently stump spell-checkers and random humans alike, I will continue to assume that I have an above-average vocabulary. :-)

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#256

Post by ScottBurson » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 6:59 PM UTC

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.

Actually, I immediately knew what "uxoricide" meant, not because I could recall seeing the word, but because of my education, which included four years of Latin in high school. ("Uxor" is Latin for "wife", and "-icide" is a very common suffix for "killing".)

So, I beg to differ. Education can definitely help. Bravo to you, though, for building your vocabulary on your own.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#257

Post by pflanze » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 6:59 PM UTC

cdavid wrote: post #196

gimpf wrote: post #108

I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live). This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-o…

While the exercice is interesting in that it is humbling for non-native speakers, it does seem dubious. I repeated the test 3 times, and got widely different results (10400, then 16700, then 18300). Since they are all quite outside the reported quantiles for native speakers, it may be expected to have high variance for non-native, but that means the numbers are not very useful as is.

I can't confirm your observation: my first attempt got me 11,500 words, the second 11,800. Of course I didn't check the words that I learned from the first run (I used a dictionary to verify whether my understanding was correct when in doubt, and to find out what some of the words mean that I didn't know).

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#258

Post by dmazin » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

I moved to the US from Russia when I was 10, and my vocabulary is a pathetic 18,000 or so. Which is funny, because I consider myself pretty well-read. I usually just infer the meaning of new words through their context without looking them up so I don't feel comfortable saying I know the definition of those words.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#259

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

virtualritz wrote: post #182

I am a non-native speaker (NNS) and got 15.700. I think this test is not very telling for NNSs as it doesn't consider specialist vocabulary which many of us have a lot of of, because of how we /really/ learned the language. When I left school my English was very average. When I started communicating with email with people from all over the world, but mostly the US, it improved a lot in 1-2 years. When I first went to…

>the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is severely skewed

You clearly have a very good vocabulary IMO. However, if I may, I think it should be "pertaining to certain subjects". It can be used without the "to" but sounds a bit conceited to this native speakers ear.

For example see http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&.... All the literature examples written out use "pertaining to" in some form: "pertaining thereto", "pertaining only to", "to them pertaining", et cetera.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#260

Post by dsr_ » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:03 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #206

Murkin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some studies I have seen, showed that the average newspaper has a 6000-8000 word vocabulary. Add another 2000 to cover technical/domain specific/slang words. And you should have no reason not to be able to communicate freely on day to day basis. I got 26K (English is my 3rd language) and most of the 'strange' words are from reading too much science fiction as a kid. + on showing percentiles of non-native speakers tho

Even writers of high-brow literature use a much smaller vocabulary than the one they can read. Probably more than the newspaper, but not likely 35,000 words. For non-native speakers, I would guess that there are quickly diminishing returns past about 10,000 words. Much more important is how well you're able to use those first 10,000 (or maybe even 5,000). It's one thing to recognize a word when reading it, and anothe…

Googling says that Shakespeare used 31534 words , of which 14376 appear only once, 4343 twice: http://biomet.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/3/435.abstract

Not a modern corpus, but reasonable.

Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (that would be the King James version) lists 8674 Hebrew root words for the pentateuch, and 5624 Greek root words for the New Testament.

Wikipedia suggests that full literacy in Chinese requires knowledge of about 4000 characters.