Estimate your English vocabulary size • Hacker News Board

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#11

Post by nolite » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 3:57 AM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #3

It seems to be fairly accurate. Maybe it isn't. My score: http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822 Edit: I just had a look at the median word count for adults who took the survey. It's around 27,000. I wonder whether that's true or not.. it seems to me that I'm lacking.

Methinks these survey takers doth be liars

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#12

Post by hristov » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 3:59 AM UTC

Pretty interesting, but I do hope they do not try to extract any meaningful statistics based on this. I guarantee you 95% of the people are cheating.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#13

Post by copper » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 3:59 AM UTC

Mithrandir wrote: post #4

Very interesting. The details on how it works are here: http://testyourvocab.com/details.php (My result:) http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35795

Perhaps the most interesting part of how they're doing it is that they have an algorithm that doesn't rely on the results of other test takers, except for the eventual statistics.

Also worth seeing: http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#14

Post by codex » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 4:01 AM UTC

The population is self selecting; I wouldn't trust their percentiles.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#15

Post by mdda » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 4:03 AM UTC

Obvious point : The only people interested in finding out their scores will be the kind of people who think their vocab is something worth competing on. There's no way this is a fair sample across all English-speakers.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#16

Post by diN0bot » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 4:03 AM UTC

anyone know of something like this for other languages, eg german?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#17

Post by eli » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 4:05 AM UTC

jb3 wrote: post #6

Timmy_C wrote: post #5

I think I did really poorly. My score was around 21,000.

I was about the same. I was surprised when I saw the percentiles and averages at the end.

The numbers appear to be based on people who previously completed the test. It's a pretty easy test to cheat on...

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#18

Post by copper » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 4:06 AM UTC

gabebw wrote: post #8

Some of these don't look like real words (e.g. splarge, which is definitely something that you could make up). I assume they're real, though. Anyway, my score: http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192

Oh, they're very much real, (mind you, I don't know what a a splarge is) except that they don't turn up in daily conversation.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#19

Post by eli » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 4:06 AM UTC

codex wrote: post #14

The population is self selecting; I wouldn't trust their percentiles.

Not just self selecting, but the scores are basically self-reported. It didn't actually test anything.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#20

Post by xtal » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 4:09 AM UTC

LukeFitz wrote: post #10

zoowar wrote: post #2

Just a survey in disguise. Anyway, here's my score http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35380

It's certainly a survey, but I don't know if it's in disguise...

And it was optional...