Live data from Hacker News

How many of the 170k English words do you know?

vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app

21–30 of 575 posts

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#21
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

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#22
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.

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.

Also I found that some of the definitions were not completely correct.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#30
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.

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.

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.

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).

Post reply on HN