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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?

#131

Post by fittingopposite »

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.

Haha. Yeah I figured Xylo- (wood) + sth. related to mono-poly so wood-seller made sense. Never have heard of this word before

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

#132

Post by conradludgate »

thenthenthen wrote: post #116
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick. This, and accept that people will have incorrect input and build it into the confidence. Even the smartest person in the world sometimes makes clerical errors, or has the wrong neuron fire at the wrong moment.

Moly holy the clicking is too much 3 clicks that could be one :O

300* that could be 100*

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

#133

Post by thenthenthen »

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

Also surprisingly mostly the forst or last option (might be bias)

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

#135

Post by alentred »

DC-3 wrote: post #118
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…

It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.

> It also doesn't get hard enough

Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?

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

#136

Post by pclmulqdq »

nickcw wrote: post #96

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 kno…

I also got something around 70-80k with 95/100 correct words (I don't know or use most of these words, but the later sections have a lot of words with Greek or Latin origin, which made them easy to guess). One of my wrong words was a misclick in the first section, which I think dragged down the estimate quite a lot. You may have done something similar. I assume they use a simple formula where early misses cost you a lot and late misses cost you very little.

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

#137

Post by egypturnash »

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 (!) -> (?!)

No, it should be rendered with the proper Unicode: U+203D ‽

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

#138

Post by srean »

nickcw wrote: post #96

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 kno…

Neat way to validate.

Your method of sampling could be improved further, unfortunately at the expense of ease of use. If the dictionary was sorted according to difficulty, then you could use stratified sampling.

I comment on the related aspects here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599769

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

#139

Post by zamadatix »

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 (!) -> (?!)

There isn't a "correct" way to incorrectly render the interrobang as 2 separate characters. The name was never supposed to suggest a certain ordering instead of just being both at the same time. The name "interrobang" just sounded better than "exclamaquest" (or any of the alternatives Type Talks readers submitted).

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

#140

Post by thenthenthen »

Glyptodon wrote: post #124

Some of the definitions offered are slightly short of what I expect. Like for "Obsequious" it offers "obedient to an excessive or servile degree" which isn't wrong, but it misses the expression of a sort of noisy eagerness in that servility.

Yeah, some definitions are super weird or overly specific, like ‘yield’ > ‘a specific amount of agricultural produce’ (iirc, ymmv)
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