How many of the 170k English words do you know? • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by cm2012 » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

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.

High school GPA correlates much worse (.41). SATs correlates with IQ better - .82 or so.

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

#562

Post by duskwuff » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #479

duskwuff wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also I was assuming it was picking from a huge set, but it seems everybody was shown the same words

I don't think I got "breviary" when I tried. Maybe it's using a decision tree, but everyone's ending up on the same branch by getting most of the words right?

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

#563

Post by paduc » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

As a French speaker, I think I’m advantaged for the difficult words (which are very often of French/latin origin).

I scored 74 400 and I’m nowhere near English-native.

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

#564

Post by LtWorf » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

Antoniocl wrote: post #389

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sick burn bro. I can assure you that just about every American that has made it through middle school has been taught about kinetic energy. Let alone high school.

Oh interesting, is it actually covered as part of the standard compulsory public school curriculum? Genuinely surprised, because here in Canada (Ontario) it's covered as an elective in 11th grade physics, which roughly 15/120 people in my graduating class opted to take.

I think the generic idea of kinetic energy can be explained much much earlier and to everyone, while how to calculate it can come later on.

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

#565

Post by mppm » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 7:12 AM UTC

This is cute, but here is the result I got by always clicking the longest answer, or the first one if two seemed equal:

Scientific Estimate: 71,650 words

"Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

Core Basics: 16/20

Intermediate: 15/20

Advanced: 19/20

Expert: 18/20

Grandmaster: 16/20

This is significant beyond this particular app, because biases like this are found all over the place in popular LLM benchmarks.

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

#566

Post by teleforce » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 10:14 AM UTC

Fun facts one third of English words are French words [1].

I was once reading a posted notice in French, and can mostly understand it although I don't speak French.

I suspect most of the modern English words are not even Old English. This makes learning English very difficult [2].

In this regard English is very much like C++. Once you know how to use it can becomes a very useful tools and utilities.

[1] Is English just badly pronounced French?

https://youtu.be/TUL29y0vJ8Q

[2] 10 Reasons English is Ridiculously Hard:

https://youtu.be/DrlX-L4o2KM

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

#567

Post by mhdhejazi » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

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…

One interesting observation: If you’re unsure of the correct answer, select the longest option, and you’re almost always correct!

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

#568

Post by nashbash » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

65.500, you really get for free a lot of less common english vocabulary when your 1st language is a romance language, not sure how scientific/well tuned the test and number is though but it's always fun to check these sort of tests and how they evolve throughout the years

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

#569

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

I would argue that none of "Weltschmerz", "Gaekwar", "Ucalegon" and "Houghmagandy" are really English words, although I already knew 2 of them.

And one of them prevented me from a perfect score, when I guessed wrong.

On the second run-through there was significant overlap. Maybe 30 or 40% of the words were from the first run-through.

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

#570

Post by naishoya » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #216

naishoya wrote: post #79

"77,250words "Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?" I do concur that a refined collection of incorrect proposed responses which includes selections among terms with semantic proximity, conflated synonyms and plausible morphology could refine the accuracy of evaluations; and if the test was intended to bestow authentic assessments of lexicographical capability this would in all probability become an…

God, I loathee the use of "moreso" as a synonym for "more" (rather than as "having the previously-mentioned property to a greater degree"). I'm convinced it's a hypercorrection by people who want to sound educated without actually thinking about the meaning of the words they use. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211458/more-so-o...

lol, you have hit both of myreasons for using it: 1. the previously mentioned, as nothing in the quiz bothered me to a greater degree than what i previously stated, thus it's use here is 'cromulent'... and 2. this entire paragraph is tongue-in-cheek as a play at seemingly overreaching 'embiggenment'.

Thanks for playing along. :)