English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#2Reading a lot of books and watching/listening to a lot of media put me quite high: CFR C2, 19 200 word families, above 78% of native speakers, above 99.9% of non-native speakers.
However. In real life I use maybe 1% of that :D Especially in in iternational settings where you eventually end up speaking a common denominator (not necessarily lowest common denominator).
I do get by writing on HN and reading books though :)
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#3[deleted]
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#4Just few days ago I argued here that kinkajou is not English word and should not be in an English word game. Is bryndza English word? Both have English Wikipedia article.
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#5Score of 18,900 -- often I'd have heard a word before and the process of elimination allowed me to guess it correctly. I'm guessing there's one level better CFR2?
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#6Just few days ago I argued here that kinkajou is not English word and should not be in an English word game. Is bryndza English word? Both have English Wikipedia article.
"game words" in English got a bit ridiculous nowadays. While there is around 170k in usage there are over a million known and over 8k added yearly. Apparently.
Bryndza is Central European/Eastern European product, it even means "poverty" in Polish. Wikisources say it's of Romanian/Italian origin.
But if it's commonly used in a certain language, it becomes a native word.
Their results page for different languages have some interesting plots, especially when you compare languages:
- https://www.myvocab.info/pl/results-pl
- https://www.myvocab.info/en/results-en
So based on that data:
- EN has over a million known words and is growing fast, a 12 year old knows around 10k words
- PL has around 140k words in popular dictionaries, a 12 year old knows around 40k words
I wonder how much of that is sample size and grammar interpretation (definition of word) related.
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#7Scored 65% with native speakers and 99.9% with non-native. Guess I can make myself understood. I didn’t even take the test that seriously, but there were some obscure words I’m sure no one uses anymore
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#8Score of 18,900 -- often I'd have heard a word before and the process of elimination allowed me to guess it correctly. I'm guessing there's one level better CFR2?
CEFR (a standard for describing language abilities, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...) only goes up to C2.
Wish the full results were available to look over. I scored 23,300, but they only share the reliability data:
* Correctly avoided fake words (5/6)
* Answered word-meaning checks correctly (6/6)
The fake word I missed was 'ventrel', but come on, 'ventral' (with an 'a') is a word. That's just mean! Anyway, it would be fun to see (and argue about) which of the words I didn't recognize are real.
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#9Just few days ago I argued here that kinkajou is not English word and should not be in an English word game. Is bryndza English word? Both have English Wikipedia article.
That's the greatest and one of the most frustrating aspects of English as world's lingua franca: it readily absorbs any and all foreign words and makes it a part of the language.
Re: English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?
#10Scored 87% above native speakers with CEFR level C2 and 21100 word families. I wonder if the study found anyone at the very top of the scale?