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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?

#101

Post by latexr »

analog8374 wrote: post #92
latexr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> it's intentional.

What is?

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

I fail to see the point. For one, the compliments aren’t particularly good or interesting; for another, I didn’t even read them (I just went back to check after your comment), I simply clicked when seeing green.

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

#103

Post by rhdunn »

jstanley wrote: post #8

Cool idea, am working through. It's annoying that you need to click 3 times per question, and the buttons are in 2 different places. Maybe would be better to just let me click the answer I want and then instantly show me the next question? Also who is Sandi?

Sandi Toksvig, the current host of the BBC program QI (Quite Interesting), previously hosted by Stephen Fry. She's also been on a number of other BBC TV and radio shows.

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

#104

Post by rationalist »

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.

66k for me, but I didn't get that word, instead I got ones like Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Flibbertigibbet, and Brobdingnagian... which the latter two interestingly do show up in my keyboard's word completion suggestions.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by sandworm101 »

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…

100 is too many? Thats two or three minutes at most.

I would suggest a bias in this test towards reading. More than a couple are words i know but rarely see in print. But maybe im too much a fan of british TV so i hear many of thier words without seeing them written down.

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

#108

Post by spelufo »

bobson381 wrote: post #36
yorwba wrote: post #5

There is a typo in "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," it should be "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia" instead. (Also, it breaks the layout.)

also interrobang is rendered as bang-interro (!?) when it should be interro (?) then bang (!) -> (?!)

do you really think so?!

I think bang-interro just didn't sound as nice and that's probably why it is called an interrobang.

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

#109

Post by gilleain »

jstanley wrote: post #8

Cool idea, am working through. It's annoying that you need to click 3 times per question, and the buttons are in 2 different places. Maybe would be better to just let me click the answer I want and then instantly show me the next question? Also who is Sandi?

I suspect Sandi Toksvig, one of the hosts of QI. One of the 'success' messages is "quite interestng!".

No offence mean to anyone, but the whole exercise feels very QI : superficial 'understanding' of a large range of things (for example words) without much of a connection between these words.

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