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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?

#451

Post by maplethorpe »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #297
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…

A lot are also just guessable because 3 out of the 4 definitions are obvious nonsense. I'd rather have a "I don't know this word" button than just pick the one that's obviously correct out of the 4, if the goal is to get a real estimate.

I wanted to know my real score so I intentionally picked the answer most likely to be wrong in those instances.

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

#452

Post by cake-rusk »

fl4regun wrote: post #163
apical_dendrite wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plenty of words and phrases originate from fiction quixotic, scrooge, shangri-la, Uncle Tom, gargantuan, kafkaesque, blurb, milquetoast and words like cyberspace were first used in fiction once real people use them, they stop being fictional words

The word was "Brobdingnagian", which apparently means "giant", from the book, Brobdingnag, published in the 1700s . I know all of the words you listed, even if I don't know t he books they came from, on the other hand, I've never heard anyone use "Brobdingnagian" and I've never heard of the book it came from either.

Strangely, I knew this one. Once you hear this word it refuses to leave your head.

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

#453

Post by balazspeczeli »

taffydavid wrote: post #447
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…

If you didn't already know what Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was, it's very easy to guess from four options. I agree there were too many clicks per word, I took me too long to finish. But I also found it too easy to guess the few words I did not know

Does the ability to guess the meaning of a word (from four options or context) is the same as knowing the word and using it in your speech?

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

#454

Post by jillesvangurp »

pessimizer wrote: post #88
classified wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English also has a ridiculously high fraction of Latin too.

Not from Latin but through French - the direct use of Latin in English is generally restricted to technical jargon and legal terms (that English often also share with the French.) Latin isn't really any sort of parent to Old English afaik, even though the Romans ran Britain for a while.

And French in turn was influenced a lot from Latin. Which means a lot of the French loan words have their origin in Latin. And of course Latin is actively used to this day in the Catholic church and the Church of England. Latin was widely used for written communication for quite some time. Most people couldn't read or write. But that impacted a lot of religious, scientific, legal, etc. communication and words. English also has a lot of loan words from other languages. Lots of nautical terms have an obvious Dutch origin, for example.

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

#455

Post by estebarb »

KaiserPro wrote: post #450
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…

I agree with the others But the choice of "advanced words" seems a bit odd. Obscure, isnt that obscure. Sure there are some speciality words, but most of these words are just the stuff you're gonna hear on radio4 in normal conversation

I had that discussion with my high school English teacher. We used USA oriented books and they often introduce "advanced vocabulary" which should have been trivial for Spanish speakers, or any latin language speaker for the matter.

I suppose they evaluate difficulty based on origin of the word. If you already know German or Spanish you may have a head start when learning English, but on a different subset of it.

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

#456

Post by stymaar »

Interesting choice of words I'd say: as a French person this test is pretty much a test about “how close is the English word to the original French meaning” as the test was almost devoid of obscure words of Germanic origin.

At least I learned a bunch of «faux-amis» in the process.

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

#460

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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