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I didn't see how to estimate the size of your vocabulary, I just saw a percentage. Did I miss something? Like I want to know something like, based on your answe

by tombh 7y ago

I didn't see how to estimate the size of your vocabulary, I just saw a percentage. Did I miss something? Like I want to know something like, based on your answers were estimate you know 8311 words. Edit: oops replied to wrong parent

cortesoft 7y ago
It is saying what percent of ALL words you know. So just take the total count of English words and multiply by your percentage.
- tombh 7y ago
  But I think for that to work we'd need to know the size of _their_ pool of word, not the size of all known words (which is debated anyway)
  - csa 7y ago
    The size of their pool is slightly over 60k.
- inetsee 7y ago
  I don't think this can be right. the Oxford English Dictionary has over 300,000 main words, and I got a score over 80%. That would suggest I have a vocabulary of 240,000 words, which seems a bit high, to say the least!
  - larkeith 7y ago
    Their FAQ claims 60,000 ("The word list should contain almost all English words...") so 48k+ works known, which is somewhat more believable. OED 2nd Edition (1989) has 171k full, current entries [1] (and another 47k obsolete, which I will disregard), so 137k+ words, which is quite a few but perhaps not beyond the realm of imagination. [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are...
- aasasd 7y ago
  The ‘total count’ is in hundreds of thousands, especially since the test includes some specialized terms. A comprehensive dictionary is estimated to have over a million words, but that might include trivial variations. Meanwhile, a native speaker's everyday dictionary is typically on the order of ten to twenty thousand words. No way that their ‘reserve’ knowledge extends twenty times beyond this. I'd guess maybe several thousand infrequent and specialized words, with which the total knowledge would still clock in at low tens of thousands.

by tombh 7y ago

cortesoft 7y ago

It is saying what percent of ALL words you know. So just take the total count of English words and multiply by your percentage.

tombh 7y ago
But I think for that to work we'd need to know the size of _their_ pool of word, not the size of all known words (which is debated anyway)
- csa 7y ago
  The size of their pool is slightly over 60k.
inetsee 7y ago
I don't think this can be right. the Oxford English Dictionary has over 300,000 main words, and I got a score over 80%. That would suggest I have a vocabulary of 240,000 words, which seems a bit high, to say the least!
- larkeith 7y ago
  Their FAQ claims 60,000 ("The word list should contain almost all English words...") so 48k+ works known, which is somewhat more believable. OED 2nd Edition (1989) has 171k full, current entries [1] (and another 47k obsolete, which I will disregard), so 137k+ words, which is quite a few but perhaps not beyond the realm of imagination. [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are...
aasasd 7y ago
The ‘total count’ is in hundreds of thousands, especially since the test includes some specialized terms. A comprehensive dictionary is estimated to have over a million words, but that might include trivial variations. Meanwhile, a native speaker's everyday dictionary is typically on the order of ten to twenty thousand words. No way that their ‘reserve’ knowledge extends twenty times beyond this. I'd guess maybe several thousand infrequent and specialized words, with which the total knowledge would still clock in at low tens of thousands.