The 171,476 figure from OED is used inaccurately in a way that shows a gross misunderstanding of dictionaries and language. The number 171,476 refers to the number of full entries for words in “current use” as defined in the 20-volume Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It does not represent words. It also does not include all the OED's variant spellings, inflected forms, phrases or run-ons (sub-entries derived from the main entries). Additionally, the OED is by no means a complete inventory of English. In fact, it's probably millions of words short, especially as it has an incredibly slow update cycle. Source: I am a dictionary editor and lexicographer, use OED daily, and know the people who make it.
How many of the 170k English words do you know?
511–520 of 575 posts
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#512Fun fact: there's a test you can do called wordsum which correlates extremely highly, like .71, to IQ. It's just asking you 10 vocabulary questions. It turns out knowing advanced vocabulary correlates really well to IQ.
I can see how that’s confusing. But I always remembering people saying “can I speak candidly about this?” With them following up going off on the subject in detail and lots of emotion.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know that one, but I do know gargantuan, and pantagruelian, which come from a 17th century novel by Rabelais as well as yahoo and Lilliputian, which come from a 1726 novel by Swift.
"Yahoo" and "Lilliputian" come from the same 1726 novel by Swift as "Brobdingnagian".
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#51478.000 (-2 advanced, -3 grandmaster), pretty good for a second language; the test's maximum appears to be 85.000.
The alternatives to choose between appear to be LLM-generated, you can see several patterns ("now" and "forever" appear a lot).
Years ago, I used to play a similar game that you could keep playing and where you levelled up when you had enough words correct in a row, or down for a single mistake. A fun thing about it was that at very high levels, it got easier for me because they mixed in some old English words which were essentially the same as in Dutch, my native language. There was a charity aspect to it as well, I think it was https://freerice.com/ , but they seem to have simplified the game now.
The university of Ghent (Belgium) also used to have an interesting test which rated your proficiency according to average scores at certain education levels. There I got 41.000 (IIRC), which was rated as average for a university-level native English speaker. An update at the bottom of https://languagehat.com/ghent-vocabulary-test/ discusses where that test went and has a few alternatives. Edit: https://www.myvocab.info/en is pretty similar to this test (found in another comment).
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#515Picking max(len(answer)) is the right choice almost every time at the higher level..
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#516Should use an ELO rating to find your level faster. Slogging through 100 basics is pointless.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#517Interesting 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.
Some of the most obscure English words are essentially Dutch though. There was a test online at some point (see my other comment) that was quite hard for me but got easier at the very highest levels.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not. Quite a few have Latin roots and the like that corresponding French words share.
Approximately 0.0% of those came into English through Latin, while around 100% came through Norman French.
That depends on when and how they entered English. A lot of scientific vocab was taken directly from Latin and Greek.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#519Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Englis…
It's not just influence: French descended from Vulgar Latin, with a lot of influence first from the Gaulish (Celtic) substrate and then from the Frankish (Germanic) conquerors.