"Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of." This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context. Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the…
One of my favorite things about reading on a Kindle is the ease with which I can look up words -- "garron" being one of the most recent, in fact.
Speaking of animals, how is names of plants and animals counted? Is that part of a vocabulary, or is that special? I'm also not a native English speaker, and one area where I know there's a huge difference between my Swedish vocabulary and my English is when it comes to names of plants and birds and spices and animals and trees and fish and rocks and flowers and vegetables and fruits. I know maybe thousands of names…
> (Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) ) Not sure if you're joking or not, but to be clear to non-native speakers: bananas are definitely not berries. Berries are smaller and rounder. For example: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. I guess strawberries, too, but they're outliers. Also the plural of deer is deer.
Bananas ARE berries, so are watermelons and tomatoes. But strawberries and raspberries are not berries.
Berries have seeds on the inside; a strawberry's seeds are on the outside, and raspberries are little clusters they are called something else. It's a famous quiz question in the UK :)
I scored far lower than I thought I would, and am genuinely surprised given that I tend to write a lot and have always thought I had a decent vocabulary.
I would love to be able to compare my score to what it would have been before moving to a non-English country and learning/speaking a new language. I definitely feel that a large part of my memory is now dedicated to Japanese and not English...
> (Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) ) Not sure if you're joking or not, but to be clear to non-native speakers: bananas are definitely not berries. Berries are smaller and rounder. For example: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. I guess strawberries, too, but they're outliers. Also the plural of deer is deer.
Bananas ARE berries, so are watermelons and tomatoes. But strawberries and raspberries are not berries. Berries have seeds on the inside; a strawberry's seeds are on the outside, and raspberries are little clusters they are called something else. It's a famous quiz question in the UK :)
It depends, of course, if you're talking as a botanist or as a cook. It's one of those words with multiple levels of truth.
Same with tomato - it's a fruit botanically, but in culinary terms it's a vegetable and definitely not a fruit. As long as you get your context right, you won't have problems communicating :)
I was actually a bit surprised, not by the specific number of words (that seems reasonably fair given some statistics posted above on this thread), but on the percentage ranking. I'm a doctoral student whose vocabulary score was in the 96th percentile on the GRE and I knew every word when I took the WAIS-IV. Here, my score of 28,300 is just a bit above average. Either people are lying (possible) or this curve is clearly not a normal curve representative of the population (most likely). I'm a pretty avid reader, even though most of the older authors like Dickens bore me (thanks ADD!), but the person that came up with those words is possibly the most voracious reader I have ever met.
I also just realized that taking the test primed me to write in a way more intelligently sounding manner than I usually do. Not an LOL in sight!
I scored only 20400, but it makes me ask myself: Perhaps I was being too honest? There were certainly words I'd seen before, and could make educated guesses as to the general meanings of, but I chose not to check those off.
I'm Canadian born and raised, with English as my first language. Honestly, I'm surprised to be told I'm that far below the median and average.
25,500 ~ Dutch. I'd hoped to score at least median, disappointing. My exposure to English is pretty much limited to TV, 19th century literature, day-to-day conversations, and tech articles.
I'm a native speaker. I read a lot. Fiction, nonfiction, literature, etc. I've got a master's degree in CS. I'm a published author at multiple respected conferences. I've been learning Spanish as a second language for ~2 years. I scored about 33,000. I don't think the distributions are very accurate. I can't speak to where you should be, but I think you have an excellent score. I hope this point of comparison helps.
I also got 33K, ~80th percentile. But, I got 98, 99th percentile on the Verbal section of my GREs (which has a lot of vocabulary, though it isn't only vocabulary). I find it hard to believe there's that big of a gap, though I suppose a lot of foreign applicants could drag down the GRE average, pushing me up. But, it's also possible that people were liberal with their claims to understand words.
No matter how many I did (I'm fine, thanks), I would love to see a similar system that estimates one's vocabulary using already existing articles.
To put aside the ego matters, I'm curious if there are any interesting correlations for writings published in magazines. For instance, between the estimated vocabulary size and the average price for ads (I bet that there is a huge correlation.)
I am Dutch, and the estimated vocabulary is 15,600 words. It's really humbling, but on the other side surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary. But I bet the distribution is not very similar to an American kid with a vocabulary of that size ;). It's easy to notice the difference in vocabulary in practice. Native speaker's speech is much more varied. Also, it's maybe go…
This is actually not surprising since word Frequencies more or less follow a power law probability distribution. With a vocabulary of even 1,000 words you are very well covered. Anyone who engages in a discussion with words that are not very common is doing the very opposite of trying to communicate.
I choose words on the basis of how precisely they convey my desired meaning - which may exist at multiple levels, eg using esoteric words when talking about esoteric words. It seems to me somewhat anti-elitist of you to decry those who enjoy taking such care.
(I scored 35,300; of the words I recognized only about six were ones I don't either read or use with some regularity. I read a fair amount of literature though.)