How many of the 170k English words do you know? • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by dgacmu » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

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

I think you mean it's lognormal, at least if we're discussing native English speakers or comparing those with similar amounts of exposure to the language.

(The median English speaker almost certainly knows several thousand words, or word stems to avoid duplication. But the number who know all words in the tail is exceptionally small.)

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

#362

Post by rcfox » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

Interesting that this showed up here now. I did it a week ago after hearing about it on The Rest Is Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw

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

#363

Post by olalonde » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

geuis wrote: post #349

Not sure what this is measuring. I did 30-40 words and got bored because the words are really basic. There's no challenge here. Not even a fun 5 minute game. These are basic English words, nothing extraordinarily hard to understand.

Keep going. I got the first 80 words correct and only 11 of the last 20 words.

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

#364

Post by olalonde » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #5

There is a typo in "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," it should be "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia" instead. (Also, it breaks the layout.)

Ah, that explains why I got it wrong.

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

#365

Post by bjourne » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:34 AM UTC

Why not add keyboard shortcuts? Would make a much more polished desktop experience.

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

#366

Post by LeonB » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

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 definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.

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

#367

Post by schoen » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:54 AM UTC

dogmatism wrote: post #347

jzer0cool wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100

I read a lot, and have since I was a child edit: also, native English (well, American) speaker

Same here. Also, I studied Latin and Greek in school and have kept studying them in various ways since then. I think this test is significantly biased toward vocabulary with these origins; dozens of tested words are directly recognizable as the "ordinary" Latin or Greek words for some concepts, or direct combinations of common Latin or Greek roots.

A lot of prestigious and scholarly vocabulary in English has come in through Latin and Greek (at various points in the history of English!), so you can learn that vocabulary or make it more memorable or more transparent either by studying Latin and Greek as languages, or just by studying some of their common morphemes (e.g. there are lists of Latin and Greek roots that may be given to medical or life sciences students to help them learn to recognize the meaning of terminology coined from these languages, even without speaking the languages).

But I think it's actually unrepresentative of the English language as a whole if we're literally thinking about vocabulary size rather than historical prestige of some part of the vocabulary. For example, foreign foods like "nori", "pandan", "dolma", "vichyssoise"[1], or "berbere" are often used as English words and would probably appear in large English dictionaries nowadays. None of that was tested in this quiz. I saw one foreign political term which I guessed at, and one or two German loanwords which I knew (I've also studied German), and almost everything else was Latin or Greek origins!

[1] apparently coined by a French-speaking American based on French roots?

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

#368

Post by mlinhares » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:57 AM UTC

Needs keyboard support ASAP. Using the mouse for something like this is a waste of time.

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

#369

Post by BenjiWiebe » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:57 AM UTC

rationalist wrote: post #104

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I also got exactly 74k. Stuff like “xylologist” I guessed had to do with vegetation because of “xylem”, whereas xylophone player was too on the nose. Then again, maybe knowing xylem in the first place makes 74k reasonable.

66k for me, but I didn't get that word, instead I got ones like Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Flibbertigibbet, and Brobdingnagian... which the latter two interestingly do show up in my keyboard's word completion suggestions.

I've encountered flibbertigibbet and Brobdingnagian. Never encountered hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia before, at least I don't remember encountering it.

Flibbertigibbet appears in some of the Little House on the Prairie (Laura and Mary) books, if I remember right.

And I've also read Gulliver's Travels which is where Brobdingnagian comes from. Brobdingnag was a land of giants. Pretty sure I've seen the word used elsewhere though.

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

#370

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:21 AM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #272

brianleb wrote: post #263

As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…

"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" Hippopotamus does mean river horse and I was caught out by that (note the o instead of a in ...poto...). I think that word is really a joke - lol - a bit like floccinausilihilipilification, which I wont bother looking up the speling 4.

Various sources suggest it's a literal joke, e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hippopotomonstrosesquipedalio...