Estimate your English vocabulary size • Hacker News Board

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#261

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:05 PM UTC

johnsonjohnson wrote: post #220

Putting aside all the comparing. Many non-native speakers here say they read and watch many things in english. I do that do and I'm quite positive that 95% of all the reading and listening I do each day is in english. Now with a low score of 17500 I wonder, if it isn't enough to completely endulge oneself in the language, what is? Of course, watching the Simpsons all day won't teach me some of the rarely used words.…

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=endulge

Sorry, couldn't resist. For a minute I thought I'd missed out on an alternate spelling. Then I realised that was unpossible ;0)>

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#262

Post by homemadejam » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:08 PM UTC

My score was 10,700. Not too bad considering I'm dyslexic right?.... Right? :|

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#263

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:12 PM UTC

thret wrote: post #100

40,300 and I am astounded that there were words I hadn't seen before. Funambulism is my new favourite word.

I wonder if any that got it did so because they recognised the word from prior usage? Or instead did they recognise the Latin form and guess it.

By rights a funambulist should be a John Cleese impersonator ...

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#264

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:13 PM UTC

slowcpu wrote: post #35

37,200 I am a non-native speaker

Where did you learn such a broad vocabulary?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#265

Post by lucisferre » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:26 PM UTC

flatline wrote: post #238

Eliezer wrote: post #29

I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked…

I can't imagine that the percentiles are reflective of the general population...I got 27,000 which it claims is the median score, and from practical experience my vocabulary is quite a bit larger than most people's. If this is measuring, say, the HN crowd, then perhaps it's accurate.

I found the same thing. I suspect a combination of the early respondents being quite a bit above average and the possibility that some people are checking words they don't actually know, or simple believe they know a correct definition for.

I think it would be a good idea to weight the survey with some test questions that ask if you know a definition to some of the less common words and then ask you to pick a correct definition from a list of 5 with 4 incorrect answers. At least this way they can approximate how much someone may exaggerate their knowledge.

However as someone who answered as honestly as I could (without spending the time to verify my definition of each word) it is cool to know what my personal vocabulary is.

Also this article does claim 24k-30k is the average for native english speakers: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/english-lan...

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#266

Post by bdesham » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:32 PM UTC

officemonkey wrote: post #166

gimpf wrote: post #108

I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live). This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-o…

Don't worry, this article ( http://howlearnspanish.com/2010/08/how-many-words-do-you-nee... ) says that for most people, 3,000 words will get you to 94% of oral communication and 10,000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers with higher education. The difference between 10,000 and 30,000 is knowing the words "uxorcide" and "tricorn". Before this test, I've never seen the first one and the only time…

I knew “uxorcide”, but only from reading about Battlestar Galactica online.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#267

Post by qusiba » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:37 PM UTC

Oh, I got only 16900. I think I will do the test again each year to see if I'm improving.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#268

Post by officemonkey » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 7:51 PM UTC

liedra wrote: post #187

officemonkey wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GRRM tends to use a bunch of unusual words pretty frequently: "dandle", "garron", "palfrey", "hauberk", "solar".

I thought in aDwD that "leal" was just yet another Kindle OCR mess-up for "loyal" until I found out it actually really is a word - an old English word for "loyal"! Goes to show... something, I guess! :)

That's why I really like reading with the Kindle app. The dictionary is only a tap away. I'm now in the habit of looking up every word I don't know.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#269

Post by rincewind » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 8:00 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #245

robert-boehnke wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the quality of the result is highly dependent on the honesty of the person tested, but with multiple choice, wouldn't you be able to deduct the meaning of the word from choices you are given? E.g.: One of the words I encountered in the test was 'terpsichorean'. While I knew that Terpsichore is one of the Muses, I did not know which one and left the box unticked. Had there been multiple choices, I might h…

I ticked 'terpsichorean', because it made me think "dreamy travelogue writing of a scenic beach with either terpsichorean sky or sea, it means X looks a pale shade of blue-green". Google tells me it means dancing so I was way way off (maybe conflating turquoise and cerulean?). But I have no way of knowing how many words that I feel comfortable defining are actually nowhere near correct, so to be any kind of accurate,…

I did not tick the word, but I know Terpsichore is a muse. Do the other eight also have english adjectives?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#270

Post by akavi » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 9:24 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #260

_delirium wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even writers of high-brow literature use a much smaller vocabulary than the one they can read. Probably more than the newspaper, but not likely 35,000 words. For non-native speakers, I would guess that there are quickly diminishing returns past about 10,000 words. Much more important is how well you're able to use those first 10,000 (or maybe even 5,000). It's one thing to recognize a word when reading it, and anothe…

Googling says that Shakespeare used 31534 words , of which 14376 appear only once, 4343 twice: http://biomet.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/3/435.abstract Not a modern corpus, but reasonable. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (that would be the King James version) lists 8674 Hebrew root words for the pentateuch, and 5624 Greek root words for the New Testament. Wikipedia suggests that full literacy in Chines…

Note that in Chinese, character is not the same as word.

Most modern Mandarin words are bisyllabic, and represented by the combination of two characters, and their meaning does not necessarily derive in a straightforward way from the meanings of their constituent characters (for example, the word for "thing" is composed of the characters for "East" and "West" in conjunction)