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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?

#521

Post by astura »

LeonB wrote: post #366
jwpapi wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Frugal doesn't mean anything "excessive," it's not the same as a cheapskate or tightwad.

Being frugal just means allocating scarce resources in a way that provides most utility and value.

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

#523

Post by margalabargala »

inkyoto wrote: post #437
margalabargala wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kowtow certainly is. Gaikwar is arguable.

kowtow (叩頭) is a Cantonese word borrowed into English in the early 19th century.

Exactly, it's been an english word for hundreds of years.

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

#524

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

widgets wrote: post #506
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #333

They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha. Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other. This is why when peop…

"Fair and impartial" being a phrase does not preclude "impartial" and "fair" from having overlapping meanings. English has plenty of phrases like that. "Vim and vigor" are synonyms. "Intents and purposes", "prim and proper", "born and bred", "leaps and bounds", "pins and needles", "movers and shakers", "hack and slash", etc. Every dictionary I've checked so far has "fair" as a synonym for "impartial" and a definition…

Ok. "Partial" means "unfair". You've cracked the code. My bad.

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

#525

Post by stevage »

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…

Confusingly I got three wrong but got the same vocab estimate.

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

#526

Post by quickthrowman »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #333

They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha. Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other. This is why when peop…

> Partial means to favor one side or the other.

If partial means to favor one side over the other, and impartial is the antonym of partial, then the implied definition of impartial is ‘not favoring one side over the other,’ which can be rewritten as ‘treating all sides equally.’ Favoring one side over another is unequal treatment, it’s unfair to the side being treated worse than the favored side.

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

#527

Post by [deleted] »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #380
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy? 95% of Americans.

Sick burn bro. I can assure you that just about every American that has made it through middle school has been taught about kinetic energy. Let alone high school.

[deleted]

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

#529

Post by ralferoo »

montag wrote: post #326
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…

The test hardly seems adaptive (if at all) and yet it made the HN front page. That’s impressive.

Of the words people are commenting on here, I only remembered one of that (maybe that's just because I got it wrong), zenzizenzizenzic. I guess if I'd realised zenzi was relating to squaring, I might have guessed it.

I think some of the, were flawed - I can't remember what it was now, but one word two of the meanings were kind of appropriate, but I chose the wrong one, and I think there were 2-3 words I didn't know but guessed from the components in the words. At least one I also guessed that way, but got the complete opposite meaning!

I like this kind of test, but for me, the first 2 sections (which I aced) were kind of redundant. Maybe they needed to stratify it more or do it more dynamically, e.g. maybe do half the layer 1 questions, and if you get all them correct, move on to half the layer 2 questions. If you get one wrong, you get the rest of the layer 2 questions, and maybe if you get more than a certain number of those wrong you also have to go back and do the rest of layer 1. If you ace the first half of layer 2 as well as layer 1, maybe you jump straight into layer 3, etc...

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

#530

Post by z2 »

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

In particular, I got a bunch of guesses correct because there's a pattern that several options are often related to each other, and either only one is different, (e.g., "Do good", "Do bad", "Be evil") -- in which case the answer is obvious -- or at least there's a contrasting pair which narrows it down to a 50% chance.
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