76250, or 93/100. Native English speaker from London. Some of the last 10 words were seriously obscure. Are accoutrement and ziggurat really English words? Accoutrement is even pronounced as French!
I did 78000 and I'm not a native English speaker.
How many of the 170k English words do you know?
481–490 of 575 posts
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#482I bet non-native speakers know more English words.
So it seems. Would be lovely to have statistics shown at the end of the quiz.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good. Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia:…
> and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome) Well.. Hippos is greek for horse, and Hippopotamus is a "river horse". Same for Hippodrome, a course for horses. And in latin, hypo means small (and not large), as seen in e.g. hypoglycemia.
And I thought in German Nilpferd (horse from the Nile) sounded ridiculous. It is almost the same as the original. TIL
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#484[flagged]
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#485Having the name of a former Indian state doesn't seem to be cricket.
At least I can step away from the laptop now I've got RSI.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#486I had a feeling they are testing something else. Around 50% of correct answers were option 1
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#487I got 35000, 18/13/9/9/6. Not my first language.
Interesting how literally everyone here's performing better than I do. Perhaps that's because I just clicked on the first option whenever I don't know about a word.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#488Interesting 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.
In general the observation in English is that most words that are close to what medival lower classes did everyday (tree, cow, house, stool): (træ, ko, hus, stol) are of danish/norse origin, and those from French are related to what the upper class did (arbory, beef, mansion, chair): (arbor, bœuf, maison, chaise) So not surprising perhaps that many of the more obscure words end up being french.
> So not surprising perhaps that many of the more obscure words end up being french.
Of course, for a native speaker at least, but for people with English as a second language there are many lower-class words that we never encountered before, because they simply don't occur in books or in online discussions. I got 88 correct out of 100 in this list but I'm almost certain I'd have faired much worse had the list been about niche house or agricultural items.
What counts as "obscure" is highly context dependent.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#489>Gemini 3 Flash AI
enough to ingore the results
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#490I am building in the language learning sector, and this test is almost certainly not accurate (depending on what you want to measure). It's fun and cool though. But basically this is all based on a frequency list, which itself depends on the corpus. I have not been able to find a good corpus of English which is representative of modern spoken English. Spoken english depends on your age range and subculture and and changes every few years. Example: https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/words
Most of the corpuses I've found heavily over-represent newspaper articles and books, obviously. So the frequency ranking is biased towards academic/crime/geopolitics, not spoken english. But even then, it depends what you most commonly speak about!
There's no better way to do it, though. I'm just providing context.