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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?

#471

Post by wazoox »

mpreda wrote: post #466
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:…

> 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.

Hypo is Greek too, not Latin "small" for a latin radical would be "mini" (from "minus") like in miniature, minuscule, etc.

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

#475

Post by n4r9 »

Muskwalker wrote: post #425
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-"…

In my mind "complacent" means the opposite of "pro-active" - not taking actions or decisions in the face of an issue. That could be because of feeling panicked or uncertain. So I was also surprised by the "smug" and "self-satisfied" parts.

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

#476

Post by herodoturtle »

da_grift_shift wrote: post #404
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…

Unfortunate bullshit asymmetry here. Taking the time to thoughtfully point out inaccuracies in a piece of vibesludge excreted in seconds.

“vibesludge”

^_^ hah what a great word, first time seeing it.

Another one I came across recently - “sloptimization”

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

#477

Post by RugnirViking »

The harder words are trivia questions an educated English native could get. What I mean by this is they're all words that you'd have a chance of knowing for a reason. Things like defenestrate, antidisestablishmentarianism, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. I know these words, but these are not words I know because I've ever had cause to use them. Words can get way harder than this and still be actually used, and not strictly only in a scientific sense. I'm thinking things like "Ginnel" (narrow passage between houses) or "Vamp" (a part of a shoe) or "Moraines" (hilly landscape formed by glaciers) or "Lea" (land used to pasture animals)

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

#478

Post by rcxdude »

summarybot wrote: post #18
cm2012 wrote: post #9

Fun fact: there's a test you can do called wordsum which correlates extremely highly, like .71, to IQ. It's just asking you 10 vocabulary questions. It turns out knowing advanced vocabulary correlates really well to IQ.

I don't know if I can get behind .71 implying "correlates really well" ... that's the issue I had recently with talking with GPT, it was evaluating my logical reasoning ability based on the vocabulary I was employing. You don't need fancy words to be intelligent.

I think people don't often have a good intuition about what different correlation coefficients actually look like or imply.

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

#479

Post by tialaramex »

duskwuff wrote: post #429
hatthew wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, breviary is the only word in the first 80 that I hadn't ever seen before but I understand that if you're Catholic it's probably not that much weirder than "rosary" or "Eucharist" or whatever which are words I did know, so fine.

In the last batch there were a few words that I was vaguely confident of but a lot more of them seemed like "stunt" words I would never see because every time they'd need defining so why bother.

Also I was assuming it was picking from a huge set, but it seems everybody was shown the same words, so while it's supposedly a "sample" any bias, even if unintended, shows up in the results, if you wanted to be scientific perhaps you'd do this for 1000 words and then sample 100 questions from that for each participant or something.

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