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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?

#301

Post by FLHerne »

jwpapi wrote: post #266
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…

Also the explanations are too broad. F.e. Frugal - Economical with money or goods I don’t think frugal means economical it means rather over the top … Yeah I don’t know how to define it properly but I don’t need to learn new words if they don’t even teach the right meaning Ai slop

That seems a pretty good definition of 'frugal' to me. To be excessively frugal would be miserly, tight-fisted or whatever.

There were a couple of definitions I did think were a bit off, e.g. 'zenith' and 'nihilism'. And one word where two answers seemed valid but I forget which.

Sometimes it gives one of several possible meanings but that's a valid choice.

In general I think it's a fun quiz - agreed with others though that the word selection brackets aren't ideal. It spends a lot of time on everyday vocabulary, then jumps straight into long words that someone made up one day as a joke.

The words I find most interesting are those that convey some subtle nuance, or describe some very specific thing - tools for old crafts, uncommon but genuinely used adjectives and the like. Very few of those appear.

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

#302

Post by adammarples »

The words are so easy that this is pointless, and three clicks per word means I'm not going to get to the harder ones at the end. A proper spread of very difficult words split between scientific, historical, artistic, linguistic, colloquial, old, new, colonial, etc would give a better sampling. If I know "palimpsest" I probably know "pledge" you don't need to cover much of the easy stuff.

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

#304

Post by Per_Bothner »

alberto-m wrote: post #240

I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.

"Defenestrate" was not in my list, but it's a word I would have gotten, as I know it from: (1) An A.C. Clarke short story ("The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch", in "Tales from the White Hart", if I remember correctly); and (2) The Defenstration of Prague (I have visited Prague Castle - there were apparently multiple defenestrations there). It's an interestingly (amusingly?) macabre word. (It also helps that I know high-school French and German plus understand Swedish as being very close to Norwegian.)

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

#306

Post by copperx »

irishcoffee wrote: post #287
stbullard wrote: post #246

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error. (context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score) I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words? Their "How is this calculated" page that…

As an aside, I am also an avid reader, always have been, 790 on the !math part of the SAT back in the very early 2000s. I attribute most of my success in life to reading early and often. Bartending in college rounded out the social skills (for me) but those two skills have carried me further than I anticipated, coming from a poor background. Have you found the same to be true?

How did bartending improve your social skills? On the surface, it looks like a regular customer service job.

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

#307

Post by zvr »

stbullard wrote: post #246

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error. (context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score) I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words? Their "How is this calculated" page that…

Exactly the same feedback: I got all 100 correct, and the results were the same as yours.

As it usually happens in this kind of "check your vocabulary" tests in English, being Greek gives you an advantage in higher levels ;-)

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

#309

Post by a022311 »

zvr wrote: post #307
stbullard wrote: post #246

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error. (context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score) I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words? Their "How is this calculated" page that…

Exactly the same feedback: I got all 100 correct, and the results were the same as yours. As it usually happens in this kind of "check your vocabulary" tests in English, being Greek gives you an advantage in higher levels ;-)

I'm Greek too and I got 81 (well technically I misclicked one in a hurry, would've been 82). It did help a bit though. Surprisingly enough I've learnt many of the more advanced words from technical blogs!
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