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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?

#231

Post by gib444 »

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.

> stephen fry

"May I compartmentalise? I hate to, but may I? may I?"

"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers"

"...saying the same weary things time after weary time: I love you. Don't go in there. Get out. You have no right to say that. Stop that. Why should I. That hurt. Help. Marjorie is dead"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg (fantastic sketch!)

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

#232

Post by tengwar2 »

2dvisio wrote: post #221
haswell wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you gave up at 50, that means you skipped the difficult words.

Agree. Complexity for me skyrocketed towards the end

Yes - a very marked step rather than a gradual increase, I thought.

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

#233

Post by superjan »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #33
Laurel1234 wrote: post #10

Pretty fun. I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow. Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.

It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The distractor answers weren't convincing enough. For starters, when an answer was based on deconstructing the word into common English words, that ruled it out. After all, if it was, then it wouldn't have been obscure. A tangent: writing distractors for multiple…

What I also noticed: when there are two contradictory definitions to choose from, it is usually one of those two.

For all its shortcomings, this was part of the fun, deducing the likely correct answer when you see a word for the first time.

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

#234

Post by tengwar2 »

bw86 wrote: post #229

84 total, with this breakdown: Core Basics 19/20 Intermediate 20/20 Advanced 13/20 Expert 15/20 Grandmaster 17/20 Scientific Estimate: 69 100 word It began very simple, so that I took it not very serious for a moment, but I never heard many of the later words. But thanks to knowing some latin and other languages, I could understand many of them. A fun idea!

81k - which is interesting, because last time I did something similar, about 20y back, it was 50k. I'm not sure if I've improved.

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

#235

Post by adamfarhadi »

tkzed49 wrote: post #210
holoduke wrote: post #207

Funny that lots of words can be guessed correctly if one knows a few European languages. I speak Dutch, German, Russian, English and was able to recognize most of the words without ever using it in English. For example Seldom. It's very similar to Zelden in Dutch. I would never use the word Seldom though.

Seldom is one of those words that's used occasionally in writing, but seldom in conversation.

Funny enough I started using the word seldom more often in English, my native language, after I learned Swedish to fluency. Swedish has the word sällan which is cognate with the English word seldom but it’s commonly used in both spoken and written Swedish. Languages are fun!

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

#236

Post by thimabi »

I got 68,900 words, with the vast majority of the errors being on the grandmaster level.

As a non-native English speaker, I found that result pretty good! Though being a native Portuguese speaker certainly helped me as many difficult words in English borrow from Latin, and in Portuguese the Latin influence is more pronounced.

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

#239

Post by soVeryTired »

curuinor wrote: post #201
nickcw wrote: post #96

I have a copy of the shorter Oxford English Dictionary from 1970 which I inherited. It is two massive volumes and is only shorter in comparison to the full dictionary which is 12 volumes (more in more modern editions). My shorter OED contains 163,000 words (compared to the 600,000 words of the longer). According to this site I know 71,000 words... Let's test that against the OED. I should have about 43% chance if kno…

can't assume gaussian underlying distribution of the word-knowing, it's known zipfian. so you can't be doing anovas or anything of that nature because if you look up zipfian distribution's variance, you get Nature and Reality giving you the middle finger

No way is vocab size zipfian. Word counts from a corpus follow zipf's law, but not vocab sizes themselves.

Otherwise the most common vocab size would be equal to one.

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