i remember of such a link in July 2011 but i could only find that one which is a bit different https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806377
How did you manage to remember the exact month? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=testyourvocab.com
How many of the 170k English words do you know?
81–90 of 575 posts
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#82Pretty 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…
It would have been nice to have an “i don’t know” button. Instead I decided to select the first option for words I didn’t know instead of trying to figure them out. Although when I got to the final group I couldn’t resist trying to figure them out. It estimated 61k for me.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#83Interesting 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 s…
> Also - too many clicks per word.
They’re also too far away. I’m on a laptop and I have to keep moving the cursor up and down just to confirm. Give each option a letter or number and let me press it to choose the answer¹.
¹ There is (was?) some service for forms which does that and it works quite well. I think it was Typeform, but I just opened the website to check and—of course—it’s now just plastered with mentions of AI so I lost interest in verifying.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#84Super fun, got 70,250. Friends have always lightly ribbed me for having to go home and look up words i've used. Those remaining 100k words must be really obscure. One suggestion would be more convincing decoy choices, some were pretty silly. But I have no idea how they come up with them.
Open any technical textbook in an area slightly outside your domain and you will quickly disabuse yourself of the notion that majority of words are obscure. Most complex words are just technical/jargon not archaic or forgotten.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#85[deleted]
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#8681,250
97/100 without being a native speaker. Although truth be told only because I figured out how to guess well.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#87Scientific Estimate: 36,250. Nah, I'm far worse.
Probably not too bad for a person whose native language is not English.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#88It's hilarious that most of these words are French
English also has a ridiculously high fraction of Latin too.
Not from Latin but through French - the direct use of Latin in English is generally restricted to technical jargon and legal terms (that English often also share with the French.)
Latin isn't really any sort of parent to Old English afaik, even though the Romans ran Britain for a while.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#89I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.
Yeah I got 75k~ and did something similar ... most of the expert and grandmaster ones had at least 1 or 2 obvious incorrect answers, then it was a 50/50 so I usually went for the thing that sounded either closer to the root of the word or completely left-field
Anything up to expert was obvious
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#90I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.
Also, just pick the longest answer :)