Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 575 posts

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

#171

Post by sowbug »

sd9 wrote: post #30

Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored. I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust s…

Plus a scroll on mobile because the submit button is below the fold, though it seems to stay in the right place after the first scroll.

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

#174

Post by bobson381 »

zamadatix wrote: post #139
bobson381 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also interrobang is rendered as bang-interro (!?) when it should be interro (?) then bang (!) -> (?!)

There isn't a "correct" way to incorrectly render the interrobang as 2 separate characters. The name was never supposed to suggest a certain ordering instead of just being both at the same time. The name "interrobang" just sounded better than "exclamaquest" (or any of the alternatives Type Talks readers submitted).

Huh, interesting. I retract my previous statement! I'd love to read about this if you have a source.

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

#175

Post by naishoya »

Findecanor wrote: post #119

I got an estimate of 70,550, from a score of 87/100 (20/18/16/17/16). Not native English speaker. I suppose the words must be weighed, because other people in the thread with more correct words got a not much higher estimate.

There's no need to suppose:

From the website with just one more click - like one more wafer thin mint.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.

However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words. The Algorithm

We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:

    1. Core Basics~3,000 words
    2. Intermediate~7,000 words
    3. Advanced~10,000 words
    4. Expert~25,000 words
    5. The Obscure~40,000+ words
Calculation

"If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band."

Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)

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

#176

Post by sowbug »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #68

That was fun. Bit confused by the result because it says I was "wow are you stephen fry?" Which I assume meant I did decent. (72K). But then below it said "you are a man of few words". I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.

Maybe "few words" means your larger vocabulary lets you use a single word to represent a concept that someone else would need several words to say. But the conversation ends up longer when the other person asks you to define the obscure word you just used.

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

#177

Post by latexr »

notsylver wrote: post #21

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 for the purpose):

  let loopCount = 0

  const loop = setInterval(() => {
    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).slice(0, 4).reduce((long, curr) => curr.textContent.length > long.textContent.length ? curr : long).click()
    setTimeout(() => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).at(-1).click(), 100)
    setTimeout(() => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).at(-1).click(), 200)

    loopCount++
    if (loopCount === 100) clearInterval(loop)
  }, 500)

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

#178

Post by latexr »

analog8374 wrote: post #123
latexr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's intentional. What is? > I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments I fail to see the point. For one, the compliments aren’t particularly good or interesting; for another, I didn’t even read them (I just went back to check after your comment), I simply clicked when seeing green.

too many clicks per word. and the distance between click points. that's intentional. well the point would be to see how susceptible you are to that. They're figuring out where your cost vs reward tipping point is.

I think you’re reading too much into it. I think it’s just a common design pattern that was copied and is clearly optimised for mobile, where the distance doesn’t matter that much.

Anyway, if they were running metrics on that they just became useless because I automated responding to it a bunch of times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586#48600403

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

#179

Post by egypturnash »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #145
egypturnash wrote: post #121

“You mastered 98 new words! THE VERDICT You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing.” —- This sounds more like a cute assessment of only getting two words right. And what do you mean “new words”? It wasn’t until eighty-odd words in that I actually got a word I didn’t know and had to guess by ruling out multiple-choice options.

Nice work. I only got 90. It also summarized that as though I might learn English one day. Kind of an odd result. I’m not offended, just confused.

vibe-coded index into the list of comments is backwards I guess

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

#180

Post by cyanydeez »

sd9 wrote: post #30

Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored. I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust s…

yeah, it should just be click->next;

I got tired after 8 words, looked at how many I'm suppose to know and gave up.

It'd be improved with statistical analysis; just progressively get harder and try to guess. If you wanted to gameify, you could update the stats after each answer.

Post reply on HN