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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?

#201

Post by curuinor »

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…

can't assume gaussian underlying distribution of the word-knowing, it's known zipfian. so you can't be doing anovas or anything of that nature because if you look up zipfian distribution's variance, you get Nature and Reality giving you the middle finger

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

#204

Post by billfor »

ant6n wrote: post #203
billfor wrote: post #202

It marked this definition for “Candid” as incorrect. “Secretive and very guarded” But Candid can certainly mean secretive, as in “Candid camera”.

I thought it’s candid because the subjects’ reactions are honest, unrehearsed.

Yeah it is confusing me because in all cases the camera was hidden. I just think the definitions they give should be clearcut. There may be a case for saying that the way that word functions "in real life" is a bit different than the textbook definition, in some cases.

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

#205

Post by thom »

billfor wrote: post #202

It marked this definition for “Candid” as incorrect. “Secretive and very guarded” But Candid can certainly mean secretive, as in “Candid camera”.

Surely it’s called Candid Camera specifically because it reveals something that would otherwise be hidden?

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

#206

Post by gryson »

billfor wrote: post #202

It marked this definition for “Candid” as incorrect. “Secretive and very guarded” But Candid can certainly mean secretive, as in “Candid camera”.

Candid does not mean "secretive and very guarded", though. People misunderstand the meaning of candid camera and assume it means "secret camera" and so use it that way, but that hasn't reached a level of misuse to redefine the meaning of candid.

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

#207

Post by holoduke »

Funny that lots of words can be guessed correctly if one knows a few European languages. I speak Dutch, German, Russian, English and was able to recognize most of the words without ever using it in English. For example Seldom. It's very similar to Zelden in Dutch. I would never use the word Seldom though.

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

#208

Post by scubbo »

analog8374 wrote: post #123
latexr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

too many clicks per word. and the distance between click points. that's intentional. well the point would be to see how susceptible you are to that. They're figuring out where your cost vs reward tipping point is.

Can you elaborate? Who are the imagined "they", and in what way are they conducting experiments with or monetizing this investigation?

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

#209

Post by scubbo »

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…

Indeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!

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

#210

Post by tkzed49 »

holoduke wrote: post #207

Funny that lots of words can be guessed correctly if one knows a few European languages. I speak Dutch, German, Russian, English and was able to recognize most of the words without ever using it in English. For example Seldom. It's very similar to Zelden in Dutch. I would never use the word Seldom though.

Seldom is one of those words that's used occasionally in writing, but seldom in conversation.
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