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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?

#461

Post by klempner »

julianeon wrote: post #348
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…

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:…

I will say that breviary it showed up in "advanced" for me, and was one of only two words below "grandmaster" I missed. In the modern era it is jargon, it's just that the in group (practitioners of liturgical Christianity) are in the ballpark of a quarter of the English speaking world.

I'll remark that "if you have interest in [some particular academic pursuit], you'd likely know it" is a pretty decent description of the sort of word that shows up in "grandmaster" tier.

(I have joked that, living in Japan, my English is getting worse faster than my Japanese is getting better, but breviary might well be a concrete example.)

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

#462

Post by rvba »

Per_Bothner wrote: post #304
alberto-m wrote: post #240

I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.

"Defenestrate" was not in my list, but it's a word I would have gotten, as I know it from: (1) An A.C. Clarke short story ("The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch", in "Tales from the White Hart", if I remember correctly); and (2) The Defenstration of Prague (I have visited Prague Castle - there were apparently multiple defenestrations there). It's an interestingly (amusingly?) macabre word. (It also helps that I know…

Prague defenestration is a high school history concept that is self promoting due to the combination of "funny word" and macabre.

If there wasnt this fancy word for that, used in tests and quizzes it would be a footnote in history.

When another person dies in Russia by being thrown from the window, nobody calls it defenestration. We just call it a tuesday.

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

#463

Post by d0mine »

balazspeczeli wrote: post #453
taffydavid wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't already know what Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was, it's very easy to guess from four options. I agree there were too many clicks per word, I took me too long to finish. But I also found it too easy to guess the few words I did not know

Does the ability to guess the meaning of a word (from four options or context) is the same as knowing the word and using it in your speech?

It is more like an ability to recognize the word when it is used in context.

I got ~1/3 that is very generous estimate even for "recall" case (recognize), and it obviously false for the "generate" case (using in speech) where I guess my vocabulary is likely ~1/90 of all English words.

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

#464

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

londons_explore wrote: post #458

Did the first 25, got all correct, got bored. It needs some kind of auto adjusting difficulty...

The difficulty goes up once every 20 words.

The final 2 categories were the ones that I found interesting, I had to guess a few times.

Got all correct though.

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

#465

Post by jongjong »

goldenarm wrote: post #4

It's hilarious that most of these words are French

True. I'm French native but my English is better (educated in Australia) so this created a weird situation for me where I got 14/20 for advanced words and 19/20 for expert words.

To be fair, I think I messed up a few advanced words by accident but I think the general pattern would hold because many of the expert level words seemed to have French root. So it felt like it got easier towards the end for me. Grandmaster words were a bit weirder on the whole.

I'm an engineer and read mostly non-fiction so this probably explains the gap too.

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

#466

Post by mpreda »

julianeon wrote: post #348
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…

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:…

> and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome)

Well.. Hippos is greek for horse, and Hippopotamus is a "river horse". Same for Hippodrome, a course for horses. And in latin, hypo means small (and not large), as seen in e.g. hypoglycemia.

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

#468

Post by RugnirViking »

stymaar wrote: post #456

Interesting choice of words I'd say: as a French person this test is pretty much a test about “how close is the English word to the original French meaning” as the test was almost devoid of obscure words of Germanic origin. At least I learned a bunch of «faux-amis» in the process.

In general the observation in English is that most words that are close to what medival lower classes did everyday (tree, cow, house, stool): (træ, ko, hus, stol) are of danish/norse origin, and those from French are related to what the upper class did (arbory, beef, mansion, chair): (arbor, bœuf, maison, chaise)

So not surprising perhaps that many of the more obscure words end up being french.

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

#470

Post by whateverboat »

stbullard wrote: post #246

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error. (context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score) I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words? Their "How is this calculated" page that…

I think I got 80 correct and got 57k.
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