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

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

#51

Post by yorwba »

pastel8739 wrote: post #7

I wish the option was just “yes I know this word” or “no I don’t”. Reading the definitions takes too long for so many words

A different interaction design is used by https://testyourvocab.com : just a list of words with a checkbox for each. But it might encourage overconfidence. Before their acquisition by Preply, they also had an interesting blog with statistical analysis: https://web.archive.org/web/20210724115604/http://testyourvo...

The two tests give me widely different results, probably because the sampled words aren't perfectly representative and so the results should have huge error bars to account for this sampling error.

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

#53

Post by apical_dendrite »

fl4regun wrote: post #23

apparently 54,000. Seems like it is including even fictional words though in this test (like from fiction novels). Ironically I scored higher on the expert words (18/20) than the "advanced" words (11/20)

plenty of words and phrases originate from fiction

quixotic, scrooge, shangri-la, Uncle Tom, gargantuan, kafkaesque, blurb, milquetoast

and words like cyberspace were first used in fiction

once real people use them, they stop being fictional words

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

#55

Post by mpeg »

Laurel1234 wrote: post #10

Pretty fun. I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow. Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.

It'd also be a lot less awkward to go through 100 words if it had keyboard shortcuts (1-4 for the words, enter to submit) and if they fixed the layout shift jank

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

#57

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #33
Laurel1234 wrote: post #10

Pretty fun. I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow. Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.

It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The distractor answers weren't convincing enough. For starters, when an answer was based on deconstructing the word into common English words, that ruled it out. After all, if it was, then it wouldn't have been obscure. A tangent: writing distractors for multiple…

Yeah I also got exactly 74k. Stuff like “xylologist” I guessed had to do with vegetation because of “xylem”, whereas xylophone player was too on the nose. Then again, maybe knowing xylem in the first place makes 74k reasonable.

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

#59

Post by pessimizer »

graemep wrote: post #24
goldenarm wrote: post #4

It's hilarious that most of these words are French

They are not. Quite a few have Latin roots and the like that corresponding French words share.

Approximately 0.0% of those came into English through Latin, while around 100% came through Norman French.
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