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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?

#91

Post by krustyburger »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #53
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

Kafkaesque doesn’t originate directly from fiction like your other examples any more than a word like Dickensian does.

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

#92

Post by analog8374 »

latexr wrote: post #83
sd9 wrote: post #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 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…

it's intentional. therefore testing vocab isn't the point.

I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments

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

#96

Post by nickcw »

I have a copy of the shorter Oxford English Dictionary from 1970 which I inherited. It is two massive volumes and is only shorter in comparison to the full dictionary which is 12 volumes (more in more modern editions).

My shorter OED contains 163,000 words (compared to the 600,000 words of the longer).

According to this site I know 71,000 words... Let's test that against the OED. I should have about 43% chance if knowing a word picked at random.

In my totally scientific test (ha) I chose 50 words at random from the OED and discovered I knew 29 of them for a score of 58% which is more than two sigma from 43%, this disproving the hypothesis.

I forgot what that was now, but it was a fun experiment.

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

#97

Post by kubb »

naishoya wrote: post #79

"77,250words "Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?" I do concur that a refined collection of incorrect proposed responses which includes selections among terms with semantic proximity, conflated synonyms and plausible morphology could refine the accuracy of evaluations; and if the test was intended to bestow authentic assessments of lexicographical capability this would in all probability become an…

Same here (72 750) but it doesn't feel right. I'm not a native speaker and I was able to guess some of them via elimination or cognates.

I'd say I know 10 000 words tops.

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

#98

Post by mpeg »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #57
RicoElectrico wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I guessed that one right because xylophone player sounded like a trap.

I don't understand how they rank words though, some extremely common words like xenophobia were ranked as high as much more obscure ones.

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

#99

Post by EstanislaoStan »

orrito wrote: post #39
notsylver wrote: post #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

These were likely all AI generated, or at least the alternatives were. I made an app a while ago as well, and afterwards realized AI often wanted to make a very covering answer for the correct one, making it often longer than the others, thus defeating the idea of the quiz in the process.

Yeah this is AI slop I don't like..

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

#100

Post by zulux »

pessimizer wrote: post #88
classified wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In order to stunt on the pors, English borrowed a fair amount of Latin and Greek directly - especially in law, philosophy, and the sciences.
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