For anyone who wants to take a real scaled vocabulary test, you can't beat the one given with Johnson O'Connor's aptitude tests.
How many of the 170k English words do you know?
321–330 of 575 posts
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#322I 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
Not to mention, N=1
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#323Reading through the comments, I've noticed you can tell the native speakers by their scores in the word categories. A native speaker will score 20/20 in the first two bands and progressively less in the following ones. For those who have learned English as a foreign language, the scores are more evenly distributed. So it's not uncommon to see a native English speaker totaling 90 as 20,20,19,17,14, and a foreigner rea…
I'm not a native speaker (Eastern Europe), and my scores are 20, 20, 17, 18, 15 - more aligned to your native speaker model.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#324Nice! Some feedback: The score it shows doesn't really mean anything to me. I think it would be more interesting for the user to know how they rank (perhaps in percentile terms) relative to the overall english-speaking population and/or relative to other users on the site
You’ll have to ask quiz takers for their SAT/ACT scores to estimate the (probably extreme) sample bias
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside, I am also an avid reader, always have been, 790 on the !math part of the SAT back in the very early 2000s. I attribute most of my success in life to reading early and often. Bartending in college rounded out the social skills (for me) but those two skills have carried me further than I anticipated, coming from a poor background. Have you found the same to be true?
How did bartending improve your social skills? On the surface, it looks like a regular customer service job.
The length and breadth of conversations you tend to get into as a bartender far exceed nearly any other customer service job. Not to mention it's frequently with the same people.
There are few professions where it's not unusual to have an hour+ conversation about literally any topic, and then potentially do it again the next day with the same person about a different topic. More similar to a therapist than customer service.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#326As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…
The test hardly seems adaptive (if at all) and yet it made the HN front page. That’s impressive.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#327As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…
69400 for me, and I knew I fucked up on ~ 5 I really did know.. or perhaps I didn't know them as well as I thought?
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#328As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…
"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" Hippopotamus does mean river horse and I was caught out by that (note the o instead of a in ...poto...). I think that word is really a joke - lol - a bit like floccinausilihilipilification, which I wont bother looking up the speling 4.
I was gonna say, you spelled that wrong :p
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#329I flubbed a couple advanced/master and half of grandmaster, eh good enough. Be fun to start at Master and up, but is kerfuffle really grandmaster? Gaikwar and Kowtow are English words?
Kowtow certainly is. Gaikwar is arguable.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#330Not that I want to cheat in such a game, but for many words everything but correct definition is shorter or follow some "dumb rpg text" template. Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words. Like for me most of more complex words been adjectives with few nouns. And in many cases you can just see 2/4 or 3/4 definitions are not for adjective.
> Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.
Yes, exactly like this.