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

vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app

491–500 of 575 posts

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

#491
It's made with AI and I don't know to what extent. That's enough to have no trust in the results. As a non-native speaker I find those words weird. Some "core words" I have no idea about, but many of the expert ones are easy. So yeah, at least I hope the author had fun vibe-coding it.

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

#492
I found a big problem with this - I noticed that the longest answer is very often the correct one, which kinda ruined the game. Even though I didn't want it to, it started affecting my decision-making. Luckily, I only noticed this around question 85, though those are really the tricky ones.

Good news for the project is that I think you can easily tweak the LLM to generate better alternatives.

I got 89/100, which extrapolates to 72,700. As a non-native speaker, I'm quite happy with that.

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

#493

Pretty bad that there is no option of "I don't know". A couple of times I tried to guess the wrong word on purpose when I knew I had no clue what the word meant and accidentally got the right answer. I'd expect that admitting ignorance would be an option in such an app...

Yes. One would want to avoid false positives for the accurate evaluation of one's vocabulary.

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

#494
Nice one, what I noticed is that out of 4 options 1 wrong is just something looking similar in letters, and 2 options are opposite meaning of each other - so actually the choice is 1 out of 2, not 4.

Also many highest difficulty words are actually combinations of multiple smaller words which makes it easier to guess, I got more right in expert/grandmaster than in advanced.

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

#496

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?

No, absolutely not, and that's my point. A real test would be having to type the definition, or pick from ten options

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

#497

I found a big problem with this - I noticed that the longest answer is very often the correct one, which kinda ruined the game. Even though I didn't want it to, it started affecting my decision-making. Luckily, I only noticed this around question 85, though those are really the tricky ones. Good news for the project is that I think you can easily tweak the LLM to generate better alternatives. I got 89/100, which extr…

Yeah, it happened to me too. When I notice the pattern, I go right away for the longest one, and the answer was 90% correct!

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

#498
post #177

It seems like the right answer is usually the longest of the choices, I managed to get a few just by picking the longest. It would also be nice if there was a "I don't know" instead of guessing and skewing the results by getting it right, though maybe thats accounted for

> It seems like the right answer is usually the longest of the choices You are correct. I tested that hypothesis about a dozen times and it seems that if you always pick the longest you’ll get it right somewhere in the high 70s to mid 80s. For anyone interested in testing for themselves, open the website to the first question then run this in the console (not going to spend time optimising it, it works well enough fo…

Wow! great reproduce with less effort!
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