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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?

#421

Post by jwpapi »

LeonB wrote: post #366
jwpapi wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the explanations are too broad. F.e. Frugal - Economical with money or goods I don’t think frugal means economical it means rather over the top … Yeah I don’t know how to define it properly but I don’t need to learn new words if they don’t even teach the right meaning Ai slop

That definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.

Seems like I’m the idiot here.

I had frugal stored as more than just economical.

Thanks for your comments :/

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

#424

Post by kuboble »

I have recently worked on the same kind of similar quiz for German.

However I have some other ideas and my quiz isn't "science based"

- in my quiz there are only "yes / no answers" This way you don't spend eternity reading descriptions of the word "apple". It also means I can estimate separately my passive and active vocabulary.

The OP missing "I don't know button" which will overestimate any result by 25% percent.

- I'm adjusting dynamically how many questions to ask in each bucket.

the goal of my quiz is to estimate a number of German words an English speaking learner has learned.

So I have curated vocabulary to remove "free words" like rare compounds of common words and other rare words which satisfy "any European knows this word without learning".

The final vocabulary used in a quiz is approx 8k words only

https://wortschi.de/quiz

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

#425

Post by Muskwalker »

brianleb wrote: post #263

As 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…

> complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug)

I agree that it doesn't seem 'smug', but weirdly both dictionary dot com and Wiktionary give 'smug' as a synonym or part of the definition.

But they also analyze 'smug' as equivalent to self-satisfied or self-complacent, so maybe that's the word whose meaning is not as expected.

(I would think of "smug" less as "self-" anything - it implies a relation, it's more like exulting in a superior situation one has over someone. And 'complacent' is at base being content with one's situation, but often with the negative implication that one should be acting to make things better instead)

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

#427

Post by microtherion »

EtaoinWu wrote: post #277

It is quite easy to cheese the problems: many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back"), many problem have this "correct answer + opposite meaning + 2 unrelated things" answer structure, and for the second half of the answers, very often the longest answer is the correct one. The wrong options are not well designed here. The sample of words is also heavily biased towards concepts relating…

> many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back”)

I had to look up the English word (lumbago), but German has the colorful “Hexenschuss” (witch shot). I suspect most people above a certain age can relate to there being a word for this in most languages.

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

#429

Post by duskwuff »

hatthew wrote: post #360
julianeon wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good. Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia:…

To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia

Yes. It is a word which seems to only be used as an example of a long and obscure word. I have never heard it used expressively, other than as a joke.

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

#430

Post by teo_zero »

lekevicius wrote: post #323
teo_zero wrote: post #314

Reading 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.

Oops! I had better revise my theory, then!
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