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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?

#161

Post by vova_hn2 »

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…

> A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard.

In case of online quiz you can have a "competition" between distractors:

1. start by having much more distractors than needed and pick randomly

2. for each measure the probability of it getting clicked (clicks/times it's shown)

3. show the most frequently clicked distractors more often

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

#162

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

Hahahhaha i got 62k points by just choosing the longest definitions. Great observation!

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

#163

Post by fl4regun »

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

The word was "Brobdingnagian", which apparently means "giant", from the book, Brobdingnag, published in the 1700s. I know all of the words you listed, even if I don't know t he books they came from, on the other hand, I've never heard anyone use "Brobdingnagian" and I've never heard of the book it came from either.

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

#164

Post by welshwelsh »

Joe_Cool wrote: post #115
JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #68

That was fun. Bit confused by the result because it says I was "wow are you stephen fry?" Which I assume meant I did decent. (72K). But then below it said "you are a man of few words". I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.

Combined with the factoid it features under "how is this calculated": However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words. We must be geniuses, lol.

That tracks. Active vocabulary means the set of words that someone knows well enough to actually use in their speech or writing.

That's always going to be smaller than the set of words for which a person can choose the correct definition out of four options.

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

#166

Post by goodmythical »

mpeg wrote: post #55
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

wouldn't even let me tab to sumbit, you had to click, tab through each following option, then to submit, but then you had to tab again to confirm the submission!

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

#167

Post by sireat »

This is rather like SAT from 35 years ago.

Same strategies apply for guessing the unknown especially with a modicum(it was on the test!) of Latin knowledge..

Strange that pretty every one here is getting 70k estimates (93/100 for me).

Feels a bit high at least for me as a non-native speaker.

I got 2 words I knew wrong, and guessed about 5 unknown words correctly. Those were bizarre repetitive words I've never seen before.

I remember doing a similar test from a reputable university about 10-15 years ago also in an app format and only got about 30k estimate.

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

#168

Post by scary-size »

chromatin wrote: post #148

The UX is awful - I bailed out at 25/100 JUST IN LEVEL ONE (BASICS) Might I suggest adaptive difficulty? After getting 10, 15, 20 correct in a row it should scale up the difficulty immediately, rather than waiting for 100 in the basic level 1...

Check button hidden under the URL bar thing in safari, progress bar hidden when scrolling check button in view. In between endless whitespace.

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

#170

Post by walthamstow »

stavros wrote: post #144
walthamstow wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the line is very blurry. I've used accoutrement(s) in English many times, but I've never considered myself to be speaking English when I use it. It's like joie de vivre or c'est la vie.

What about "rendezvous", or "etiquette", or "RSVP", cliche, nuance, etc? Do you consider those French or English? As you say, the line is very very blurry.

Rendezvous and cliche yes. Nuance, etiquette, RSVP no. It's instinctive so I can't explain but maybe because rendezvous and cliche require using French pronounciation. On this I think you could find more differing opinions than there are possible answers.
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