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Estimate your English vocabulary size
- zoowar 15y agoJust a survey in disguise. Anyway, here's my score http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35380 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35380
- Cyph0n 15y agoIt seems to be fairly accurate. Maybe it isn't. My score: http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822 Edit: I just had a look at the median word count for adults who took the survey. It's around 27,000. I wonder whether that's true or not.. it seems to me that I'm lacking.
- Mithrandir 15y agoVery interesting. The details on how it works are here: http://testyourvocab.com/details.php http://testyourvocab.com/details.php (My result:) http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35795 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35795
- copper 15y agoPerhaps the most interesting part of how they're doing it is that they have an algorithm that doesn't rely on the results of other test takers, except for the eventual statistics. Also worth seeing: http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php
- Timmy_C 15y agoI think I did really poorly. My score was around 21,000.
- jb3 15y agoI was about the same. I was surprised when I saw the percentiles and averages at the end.
- eli 15y agoThe numbers appear to be based on people who previously completed the test. It's a pretty easy test to cheat on...
- alayne 15y agoI got 25,600 but that was below the median of 27,123. I didn't select words I recognized but couldn't define and I double checked some definitions. I think I have a decent vocabulary. It's like I'm competing with the High IQ Society book club. You need a test where the definition is part of the test. Otherwise anyone can just check boxes.
- fiesycal 15y agoJust from getting some friends to do this it seems to me the median score overall and the median score for each age are a bit inflated. Just my thoughts, but I think people aren't being 100% truthful. Although I may just have a poor vocabulary http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36208 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36208
- gabebw 15y agoSome of these don't look like real words (e.g. splarge, which is definitely something that you could make up). I assume they're real, though. Anyway, my score: http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192
- copper 15y agoOh, they're very much real, (mind you, I don't know what a a splarge is) except that they don't turn up in daily conversation.
- ojbyrne 15y agoThe word was actually "sparge," a word that any home-brewers have likely come across.
- gabebw 15y agoAh, that's why dictionary.com didn't know what "splarge" meant. Apparently "sparge" is a sprinkling - why would home brewers know this? Genuinely curious here.
- ojbyrne 15y agohttp://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Batch_Sparging http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Batch_Sparging
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ptomato 15y agoI looked up every word I did not know in the OED (sparge being one of those), and they are in fact real.
- shii 15y agoMy result[1] isn't too bad but there's still quite a few words I can learn especially at the end. I did cheat a little since I learned a few of the more curious looking ones when this showed up on /b/ 2 nights ago. [1] http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36123 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36123
- hristov 15y agoPretty interesting, but I do hope they do not try to extract any meaningful statistics based on this. I guarantee you 95% of the people are cheating.
- codex 15y agoThe population is self selecting; I wouldn't trust their percentiles.
- eli 15y agoNot just self selecting, but the scores are basically self-reported. It didn't actually test anything.
- mdda 15y agoObvious point : The only people interested in finding out their scores will be the kind of people who think their vocab is something worth competing on. There's no way this is a fair sample across all English-speakers.
- dorian-graph 15y agoI wouldn't say the ONLY people. This could be the next 'IQ test' where it seems the near opposite, the lesser intelligent ones are who are obsessed with them. Going by magazines, common forwards and so on it seems the average man loves a good self-quiz.
- mdda 15y agoBut to remove some of the bias, we'd need approximately equal numbers of above and below average people to be going to the trouble of answering the quiz. And in the back of my mind, I thought that the bulk of quiz magazines were sold to women, no? (Though I'm probably being too pedantic...)
- meric 15y agoIt could be only either very below average and very above average people are interested in self-quizzes, too, so equal numbers alone won't be enough.
- diN0bot 15y agoanyone know of something like this for other languages, eg german?
- NnamdiJr 15y agoWas thinking the same thing..
- swehner 15y agoSeems not
- swehner 15y agoActually they have a link at http://testyourvocab.com/about.php http://testyourvocab.com/about.php: "The companion Brazilian project can be found at howmanywords.com.br" Which right now just says "Calcule o tamanho do seu vocabulário em inglês / Coming soon"
- kragen 15y agoI will be a lot more interested in the Brazilian site when it goes live! I'm not making any particular effort to expand my English vocabulary (having a smaller vocabulary is not among the top ten reasons my writing in English is worse than Shakespeare's) but my Portuguese vocabulary is muito terrivel. It would be great to have a way to measure my progress. Edit: Oh. The Brazilian site is just a Portuguese version of the instructions for the English site? :(
- matwood 15y agoI only scored 24k which seems low based on the statistics at the end. I also only selected words that I absolutely knew the definition of, even though some I think I knew based on the root. Memorizing trivia words is just something that has never interested me. Instead I keep a thesaurus and dictionary handy at all times :)
- lliiffee 15y agoThey ought to include some fake but plausible words to correct for cheaters. (Perhaps they do?)
- jamesbritt 15y agoSome of those words had a definite brillig quality.
- rdl 15y agoYet, are rather cromulent ObScore: 36000, 32yo male US-english native speaker. There were a few more I'd seen but wasn't really sure enough to define. I maxed out the SAT verbal section (and got 1 wrong on math, which was enough to drop to 780/800) back in the 1990s.
- Silhouette 15y agoAnd yet not a slythy tove in sight, gyring or otherwise. The thing that always surprises me with this sort of test is how many words I half-know: I recognise the word, I have a (correct) general sense of what it means, but either I couldn't articulate an accurate definition or the definition I would give is an uncommon usage and I hadn't come across the more common meaning(s). Following the rules strictly (so I didn't tick the half-known words), I came in slightly below average for my age, assuming the trend continues beyond the 32 years that their table currently gives. For comparison, if I also included the words I half-knew, I gained nearly 4,000 new words and went up about 20%.
- Detrus 15y ago22,700 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38336 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38336 What difference does it make? The site doesn't say what it means in everyday life. I'm guessing if you exclude high achieving SAT vocab nerds, it finds the difference between people who care about the meaning of each word and people who will guess through context because they have no patience for a dictionary. Or people who don't read fancy texts, like the Scarlett Letter for example, after failing to read that I stopped reading books.
- schleyfox 15y ago37,700 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36826 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36826 without cheating and not counting ones that I only thought I could puzzle out. Maybe working on that English Minor is panning out...
- martingordon 15y agoI'm almost 26 and I scored 26,500. Not sure I buy the results though. I would think that the rate of increase would start to decrease quite significantly after high school/college but it appears to stay pretty much linear throughout the data.
- crazygringo 15y agoSite creator here -- That has been the most interesting finding so far -- I certainly didn't expect it. Unfortunately I haven't had enough participation yet from children, or older folks :), to see how it continues to extend in either direction.
- pacaro 15y ago39,000 I use more of the words on page 2 that I should, I'm probably unbearably obnoxious to be around...
- Eliezer 15y agoI got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked was real.
- aMoniker 15y agoIlliterates are vastly underrepresented.
- soundsop 15y agoThey could also test you on some of the less-recognized words you selected to help identify cheating.
- paulnelligan 15y agoOR they could actually make it a REAL test, e.g. multiple choice I scored far lower than I would have expected, which although it hurts my ego a bit, I can easily dismiss because of the nature of this test.
- robert-boehnke 15y agoHow is multiple choice a REAL test? In all the exams I had in my life, from 1st grade to BS in CS, I only had one multiple choice test.
- paulnelligan 15y agoLet's think about it logically. If you were to actually test the users instead of asking them 'which of these do you know?', the ONLY option is multiple choice since analysing text-field input from the user to determine if their definition is correct is at best extremely difficult, and more than likely impossible ... right ?
- mike_esspe 15y agoTheir statistic is probably inflated due to linguistic subreddit, where this test originated: http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_created_this_site_to_measure_the_size_of/ http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_...
- diN0bot 15y agolots of people here are saying they scored lower than what they expected, and that maybe other people cheated. that could be it, but it could also be that hacker news folks tend to be overconfident. this would match the stereotype of this group being mainly male nerd entreprenuers, which could score worse on things like this but perceive themselves to score much higher (a feeling not a fact backed by studies that i can remember). who knows; just voicing this thought since no one has mentioned it yet.
- johnfn 15y agoI got just under the median on this test, but I scored around the 99th percentile in the SAT verbal, and I feel it's reasonable to say the two test approximately the same things. It seems unlikely that I've slipped so far in just two years :) I never really considered Hacker News to be full of overconfident people. If anything, to me being part of HN is a humbling experience. It reminds me that there are so many people out there that are smarter or more experienced than me, and I've seen other people say similar things.
- lftl 15y agoI'm pretty much in the same boat. This scored me below median, but I scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT verbal as well (although that was a decade ago for me). I think one contributing factor is the structure of the questions. If you ask me if I KNOW at least one definition for the word mawkish for example, I'll choose no I don't know a definition of it. I do however have a good enough feel for the word, that I can almost guarantee I can get a SAT style analogy with it correct, or if you gave me a multiple choice selection of definitions I can probably pick out the right one. I don't consider either of those skills equivalent to actually knowing a definition of a word.
- wisty 15y agoYeah, on the more difficult words, it becomes a test of your ability to tell yourself you know what they mean.
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- blntechie 15y agoThink I have the lowest score here. 16,400 words. English is not my native language but I speak English daily and I wouldn't say my English is bad. Pretty disappointed with the score and also surprised the median is way way higher than I expected. Edit: And, also to add, I followed 2 criteria for whether I know the word or not. 1. What's the absolute definition? 2. And can I find the equivalent or meaning of it in my native language? (which is Tamil, an Indian language, if anyone cares.)
- autarch 15y agoI think a lot of the words are ones that you will only ever encounter in reading fiction (and flower/older fiction at that). Also, keep in mind that this test doesn't include field-specific technical jargon.
- Hello_sup 15y agoThe lowest on this site has less than 14k words (guess how I reached this conclusion).
- naveens 15y ago21,400. My native tongue is Tamil too. In the second list I was surprised at some of the words, which I've never ever seen before.
- slowcpu 15y ago37,200 I am a non-native speaker
- burgerbrain 15y ago22,000 Clearly my American public school education has served me well. >_<
- davidw 15y agoNo one getting high scores did so because of or despite their education. They did it by having the sort of brain that happens to retains words like uxoricide and reading copious quantities of material in which such abstruse words are employed. I got a high score and went to public schools in the US, and didn't finish college either.
- burgerbrain 15y agoA proper (classical) education is generally widely accepted to have a dramatic positive influence on ones vocabulary.
- davidw 15y agoAt one point, the sun was generally widely accepted to revolve around the earth. It's likely that education improves one's vocabulary, however there are a lot of variables there. People who go to good schools likely come from families where learning is important in any case, are wealthier, etc...
- nostrademons 15y ago(Just over 30,000.) Personally, I learned far more of those words from reading George R.R. Martin or Guy Gavriel Kay than anything in my liberal arts education.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoAt a certain point, somewhere in the middle ranges of these scores, formal education at even the best schools will stop having any effect on your vocabulary. It becomes more a matter of where someone's interest lies. Do they read? A lot? Outside of the usual curriculum? And at the upper end, it's more about personal predilections than anything else. Are rare words like little gems that you save and collect?
- patriciomolina 15y agoDamn, that yellow background is killing my sight! I had to disable line 104 in /screen.css
- derrida 15y agoI was honest and was shocked by my result being in the bottom third! I have an IQ > 125! I think I need to read more.
- jtheory 15y agoSelf-selected survey respondents != actual population. Though I suppose, also -- IQ doesn't say much at all about what your vocabulary will be. If you don't read much, or mostly read popular literature, it doesn't matter how clever your are; your vocabulary won't be any bigger than the words you've encountered enough to form (or look up) a definition. Though it's also worth noting that beyond a certain point, building a broader vocabulary isn't very useful; when you communicate, you generally need to limit yourself to vocabulary your audience knows. Likewise, when you're reading, it's pretty common that the authors using particularly obscure vocabulary are using it to muddy their meaning, not clarify it.
- wolfrom 15y agoI'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off. When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I dismiss most options because they're much too obscure.
- dspace 15y ago> I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. This is what I was thinking. I scored 34K, and rarely encounter a word that I don't understand in regular speech or reading. I also know several thousand jargon words, none of which were on that test. I know what I need to know. Memorizing another 16K words to reach Shakespeare's magical 50K (and feel good about myself) would be a waste of precious mental resources.
- angus77 15y agoAs someone else pointed out here, Shakespeare's vocab was just over 30k (which was the number I was familiar with).
- mdda 15y agoJust as a test, ticking all the boxes scores 45,000 words. Which seems to indicate that they haven't seeded the quiz with fake words to weed out cheaters : Pity, since there was an opportunity to unbias it in at least one dimension. (I also tried deselecting just 1 of a few of the really tough words : Each one caused the score to lower).
- crazygringo 15y agoSite creator here -- you're right, there's no cheating detection. I ask people not to fill out the survey results if they're not being entirely truthful, of course they are free to disregard the instructions. But I created the site, less interested in absolute vocabulary size numbers (these vary widely depending upon methodology), and more in relative changes among age groups, SAT scores, etc. And hopefully, cheating would not be correlated to any of those... But at the end of the day, this is not a controlled, scientific survey. It is a voluntary quiz, though I am doing my best to control for other factors.
- bermanoid 15y agoI'm really, really hoping that you're logging referrer data along with scores - if you're not already, you might consider starting. Even if this is not a source of proper scientific data, it would be highly interesting to see how, for instance, the Reddit referrals do vs. HN vs. Facebook, etc. We can probably all make some fairly accurate guesses about where the high and low performers would come from, but I'd be real curious to see the exact breakdowns.
- Terretta 15y agoI only checked words that I can use in a sentence: left one blank on the first set, a handful blank on the second set. 42,500 (http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216) Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...
- gibybo 15y agoI got 17,200. I'm 22 with a Bachelor's degree and I was pretty surprised with how low I scored. Anyone in a similar category?
- lzm 15y ago18,100 words, 24 years old, non-native speaker. I've never read a fiction book in English, only technical ones.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- danneu 15y agoSame exact score. 22 years old with a Bachelor's degree. It doesn't concern me that I don't come across rare English words in my daily reading enough to know the right column. I also suspect that the average quiz-taker voted yes to words they were contextually familiar with, but couldn't give you a straight definition.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mcphilip 15y agolampoon: verb: Publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule or sarcasm. I knew lampoon had something to do with criticism, so I checked the box, but I had no idea that the definition specified a public context. Does that mean I didn't know the word? I suspect a problem with the test is that it's easy to know enough to figure out the gist of a word's definition without having any knowledge of the specificity of the definition, if that makes any sense.
- NnamdiJr 15y agoDon't care too much for percentile and age stats at the end.. clearly doesn't represent general pop. What IS interesting tho, from a language learners perspective, is the vocab size estimation. A metric a lot of us use as a rough benchmark of vocab needed for fluency in a foreign language is 10,000words. Comparing this with what an educated adult native speaker knows in their own language (using my own truthful score of 24k) is pretty interesting. Would love to have something like this to quickly gauge my vocab in other languages!
- dennisgorelik 15y agoI agree: the test seems to correctly estimate vocabulary size, but is incorrect in calculating percentile. I got 12900 (English is my second language) and it seems to be about accurate. I also feel that I'm fluent in English, and it confirms that 10000 words is sufficient for fluency. The test is also missing professional lingo: where are such words as SQL, lisp, ai, startup, PG, HN and other that we all know so well?
- Jach 15y agoI got 28,800 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38317 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38317 So apparently I should be 31 instead of almost 21. I had a phase around 7th through 10th grade where I thought learning lots of vocabulary would make me smarter, especially words others didn't know well. (And so I'd use them in English essays for Extra Points since your grades are often determined by how little sense you make, because if the reader doesn't understand it obviously it's too smart for them!) I also had a general grammar nazi-ism. Anyway, I think this exchange kind of tipped me over the edge to stop caring. (Of course that's led to forgetting a lot.) William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." Of course, having some background in French and Latin probably helps for inferring a few words.
- lostmypw 15y ago"You will never become proficient in a foreign language by studying vocabulary lists. Rather, you must hear and speak (or read and write) the language to gain proficiency. The same is true for learning computer languages." Coincidentally, I just happened to come across this quote in Peter Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming".
- onan_barbarian 15y agoI scored 38500 - seemed to be a test that would be helped by reading a lot of older fantasy literature, where 'terpsichorean' and 'turpitude' (to give a couple 'terp' examples that spring to mind) are the sort of words that authors like Jack Vance liked to wheel out in order to create a mood. I'm not sure that the people suggesting that the failure to correlate with the SAT adds much; I don't think the SAT really goes all-out of the more flowery bits of archaic vocabulary in the way that this test did. My 3rd grade son got 10200, and enjoyed discussing the words he didn't get. I think every 3rd grader should know "mawkish". :-)
- natural219 15y ago19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even my age group, let alone the general populace (I'm 20). That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm not familiar with. Most of the ones I missed are words I recognize from this series, although since I'm not 100% sure of them, so I left them unchecked.
- AdamTReineke 15y agoI'm 22 came in at 19.5k. I guess I need to use the dictionary in my Kindle a lot more.
- RobertLowe 15y agoI'm 23, I took this thing half awake and came in at 24k. I'm not an avid reader. The test seems to pull random words from a dictionary and not words used in a general mannor. Not only that but it messed all the delicious skill-trade grammar I know and love. Bollocks.
- white_devil 15y agoWould you have checked the word "manner"?
- StavrosK 15y agoOr "manor"?
- smallblacksun 15y agoor "messed"?
- The_Fox 15y agoPerhaps the results of this test don't predict academic success very well. I graduated at the top of my program (of about 30 graduates) last year and scored only 20.5k. Maybe I fell behind my peers by only reading comp sci, math, business, and communications related stuff for 4 years. Guess I've got some catching up to do.
- mortenjorck 15y agoThe psychology of these things is interesting to me. My reflexive reaction was, of course, "I have to know!" and then my immediate counter-reaction was "This is just intellectual phallometry and is ultimately of no consequence to me." Of course, I very quickly rationalized away the counter-reaction and took the test anyway, and then considered sharing it with my friends. What drives this?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- auganov 15y agoI got to be in the 1st percentile :-). But well, considering that I have never read a book in my life I guess it figures.
- sanxiyn 15y ago12,900: http://testyourvocab.com/?r=39955 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=39955 I am not a native speaker and I was happy to get more than >10,000, really.
- kunjaan 15y agoFinally some use of the GRE English exam that I had to take before joining CS program!
- parfe 15y agoWouldn't a multiple choice quiz with definitions be more accurate? Force people to choose a definition (or none of the above?) to show they actually know the word. You'd still have the issue of cheaters but at least you would know people just don't assume they know the definition of "like"
- kurumo 15y ago29,500, non-native English speaker (but studied in the US). Retook the test and omitted all the words I could not define with total confidence on the spot; the original score was 31,400. The test is peculiar in that the distribution appears to be uneven. Subjectively there is a sharp break between words that one would know from Shakespeare, Tolkien and Dunsany, and words no one would ever know unless they studied the OED. For statistical significance they would need more words.
- cduan 15y agoI didn't see any science-related words when I took the test. Not sure if this is because of the process by which they made the word lists, or because there truly are not many common science-related words.
- swehner 15y agoAt http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample they explain how they chose the words the test is based on: Quote: Too limited. Words that are specifically American or British (in meaning or spelling), or slang, or scientific/medical, or anything labeled archaic, or anything else that isn't part of broad, general English. Also, no animals or ingredients, which depend too much on where you live.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago>or anything else that isn't part of broad, general English So scientific words aren't general English? This suggests that the authors don't think anyone ever talks about science?
- 6ren 15y agoMost interesting to me were the words I recognized, but weren't sure of their meaning (e.g. malapropism, which turned out to mean ludicrous misuse of a word). BTW: a nice thing about online dictionaries is they have sound files for pronunciation. e.g. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/malapropism http://www.thefreedictionary.com/malapropism With a plugin, you can highlight and right-click to open in another tab.
- 4J7z0Fgt63dTZbs 15y agoShocking, 9885. I acquired current command on English via Internet, Harry Potter and Klan Academy - and I was pretty comfortable making points in English than in Japanese I could use some help boosting my vocabulary...
- onan_barbarian 15y agoIf you've been learning words from the "Klan Academy" you should be very careful when you first address an African-American.
- KirinDave 15y agoFor those of you concerned with your score, you are deovting an undue amount of your time in discussing the results of what is—let's be honest with ourselves—the literati version of a "Are U A Vampire Or A Werewolf?" quiz. P.S., 36,700 .. I took this before it got a lot of general circulation, and my standings have improved considerably. I suspect this makes me more worthy of oxygen.
- ahrens 15y agoI got 19 800. As a Swedish non-native speaker I thought it was OK. The test needs to also show the averages for non-natives and natives separate.
- sanxiyn 15y agoLearning to program did help. I could check "shard" and "bloat", which are apparently quite rare in general context compared to words I know. How about you? Were there words you could check because you encountered it often in programming context?
- astrofinch 15y agoVocabulary is trivia...
- taliesinb 15y agoMy god, none of this shit matters! Why does anyone put any stock in any of this kind of thing? The best a test can do is make you feel smug, the worst it can do is totally destroy your confidence. It's a lose-lose proposition.
- thret 15y ago40,300 and I am astounded that there were words I hadn't seen before. Funambulism is my new favourite word.
- Mvandenbergh 15y agoI'm guessing they selected words from a large corpus of written English based on their relative frequency. It isn't surprising that there isn't any technical vocabulary. Most technical vocabulary falls into one of the following categories: a) Acronyms b) Overloading of existing non-technical words c) Names and other proper nouns d) Phrases longer than one word There's actually an argument for excluding highly specific vocabulary (some corpuses explicitly exclude textbooks for this reason) because knowledge of them doesn't correlate as well with overall vocabulary.
- gimpf 15y agoI'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live). This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-out), and use English on a daily basis. I also watch most movies in English (very seldom for people in a German speaking country to do), read some English novels, and also most non-fiction books I have are in English. Internet use is nearly English only. Still, I probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker. After 17 years of learning and using the language, and at least 10 years of that using it _daily_. Ouch.
- davidw 15y ago> probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker I very clearly remember my first time in Italy, when I saw a family at a restaurant and realized their 5/6 year old spoke much better Italian than I did. Kind of humbling.
- roel_v 15y agoBut the average 3-year old Chinese speaks infinite better Chinese than I do (I can't even pronounce 'ni hao' correctly I'm sure, despite my colleagues kind praise of how I say it very understandably); I don't see how that's humbling. Language knowledge is imo rather useless; languages is a very inefficient idea transfer mechanism, and the amount of energy we collectively waste on translations and learning languages is staggering. I see languages as an unfortunate side-effect of human's poor natural communication traits, and I hope that we can do away with most of them asap.
- kmm 15y agoI don't think I understand. How would we communicate without language?
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- toot 15y agoI realise that the ego-stroking scoring is the driver behind this site's popularity , but I would also like to see definitions of words that I missed. It's pretty daunting to spend hours copying and pasting words into Google (well, ahem, maybe it is for some of us!)
- deadmansshoes 15y agoI felt the same. Also there were some words I thought I knew what they meant, but my definition would only be partially correct. Also some definitions you can guess at - do these count as part of your vocabulary or not? E.g. Clerisy, can be easily deduced to be the class of clerics, but not sure if I'd be able to say if it was a real word or not.
- fedd 15y agoi understand why i can't read Alexia Tsotsis articles on Techcrunch without a dictionary, with my shameful 8,560 vocab
- sandstrom 15y ago14,000; though English isn't my vernacular. Reading more English fiction seem to be a recurring suggestion, guess I should!
- fedd 15y agoto read your post i looked up the word 'vernacular' in the dictionary
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Toucan 15y ago43,300. I strongly suspect learning Latin and Greek at school helped more than a little with this particular test.
- swehner 15y agoAt http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample they hint at omitting a lot of Latin words: Quote: No cognates or false-friends with Portuguese. This probably knocks out at least half the dictionary, since Romance languages have plenty in common with English. False friends need to be avoided as well, since a Brazilian beginner will see "pretend" and assume he knows it means pretender, which actually means "intend." Interestingly, the no-Portuguese rule leaves the test with a strongly pronounced short Anglo-Saxon flavor.
- gjm11 15y agoEven so, many of the most obscure words are potentially guessable by someone with a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. Funambulist, opsimath, hypnopompic. I don't think a classical education will be much help with cantles and williwaws, though.
- evilswan 15y agoToo much clicking.
- ars 15y agoUse tab and space instead.
- jamesbkel 15y agoAlong with many of the flaws already adressed, the most relevant for me was "absolutely sure of" and also taking the words out of context. There were a good number of words that I was pretty sure I knew and had I read them in context would have been correct in my meaning and never given it a second thought. I'm certain that if I took this same test using a base of 'novel in fulltext' vs. 'list of all unique words in the novel', my recog would be FAR better on the novel.
- sgt 15y agoGot 21,500 or so. Even as a non-native speaker I was slightly disappointed with this result. Many of the words were just ridiculously obscure and esoteric, and I haven't even seen some of them anywhere in the literature I read.
- fhars 15y agoAh, cool I know 80 english words. There must be something utterly wrong with how this test works in opera mini, clicking on continue on page two brought me to page one, going back and clicking continue again gave me just a subset of the choices from page one... (at least I guess it is 80, the number was displayed right over the middle of the word "words" in the result captcha).
- gimpf 15y agoSo you have used up nearly 70% of your vocabulary to write this comment? I have to admit, your proficiency in English grammar is extraordinary given this.
- StavrosK 15y agoOh, no, he just learnt barely enough words to make that comment and a few similar ones. Quite frugal, really.
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- tlammens 15y agoOK, time to read that dictionary book again.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tep 15y ago13700 German, 22 years old I had 9 years of English in school. Because of my hobbies I read a lot of stuff in English. I also watched many TV shows and spent about 6 month living in Australia. Yet I feel insecure even typing this. Knowing lots of words is one thing. But what makes it hard are all the subtleties you have to take care of when building sentences. I also think that I get grammar wrong most of the time. Another thing is that my sentences are almost always way too long. As someone else pointed out before: I don't want my former English teacher to read this, either.
- gary4gar 15y ago14,000 Words I am non-native speaker. I guess that's a excuse for such poor score. Need to improve :(
- Troll_Whisperer 15y agoI was really surprised by the result of this. I was flipping through a friends learner's Chinese-English dictionary that claimed to contain over 150,000 words and in a couple minutes of thumbing through it I didn't find any I didn't know. But on this test, I didn't even get 50,000. Then according to the info at the bottom, the median was far less than that. Honestly I think the evaluation method is terrible. My collection of sci-fi/fantasy books alone probably contain over 100,000 headwords. A single biology text book might be as many as they claim the median person knows. Avid WoW players would similarly destroy the curve (if the test included the kinds of words they'd know instead of archaic religious words),
- kragen 15y agoWhat your friend's dictionary contains a hundred and fifty thousand of are almost certainly not the same thing that the OED contains only a hundred and seventy thousand of. Take a look at a random OED page sometime and see how many words you don't know.
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- codabrink 15y agoIt appears that this is accurate within 4 or 5 thousand words.. I've taken the test a few times, and my results are relatively distanced..
- olegp 15y ago"The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use"
- kragen 15y agoIt's interesting and humbling to contemplate that I know only about 20% of the words in my native language.
- virtualritz 15y agoI am a non-native speaker (NNS) and got 15.700. I think this test is not very telling for NNSs as it doesn't consider specialist vocabulary which many of us have a lot of of, because of how we /really/ learned the language. When I left school my English was very average. When I started communicating with email with people from all over the world, but mostly the US, it improved a lot in 1-2 years. When I first went to a congress in the US in my med 20's I was blown away by my aptitude to communicate in that language. But these were all people from my field. What I'm saying is that the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is severely skewed by the field I work in -- visual effects (and IT). I believe this goes for many NNSs.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago>the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is severely skewed You clearly have a very good vocabulary IMO. However, if I may, I think it should be "pertaining to certain subjects". It can be used without the "to" but sounds a bit conceited to this native speakers ear. For example see http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&SearchBy=4&Word=pertaining http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&.... All the literature examples written out use "pertaining to" in some form: "pertaining thereto", "pertaining only to", "to them pertaining", et cetera.
- angus77 15y agoI got 35,900, and haven't lived in an English-speaking country in 10 years. I often get frustrated at myself when I feel like I'm losing my vocab. There were a couple of words on the list that I'm sure I once knew, but couldn't conjure up the meaning on the spot, so I skipped them. I was never a sci-fi/fantasy fan, but I do like to read literature for fun.
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- apl 15y agoI strongly doubt that their methodology has any validity at all for non-native speakers. Extrapolating from a selection of 60-80 words presupposes a relatively normal developmental history; otherwise one would not be able to draw the primary inference at work here, namely that somebody who knows a definition for "mawkish" knows definitions for all words of similar difficulty and frequency. Atypical language acquisition (e.g., as a second language, or through a non-standard channel like technology or fantasy literature) disrupts this extrapolation step. For instance, a German programmer that knows the word "polymorphic" via OOP is less likely to know similarly frequent and difficult but programming-unrelated words than British or American peers. So adding, say, 100 to the total would be utterly unfounded. Same thing for a science-fiction nerd: Acquaintance with obscure words from one domain doesn't extrapolate to other domains. Unless they somehow control for domain specificity and atypical acquisition, let's not get too frustrated. (Disclaimer: Not a native speaker -- result around median.)
- wccrawford 15y agoI'm not sure it's valid for native speakers, either. Your basic vocabulary will be the same as most other speakers because we have structured learning in our schools. But the less-well-known words are generally learned in context... So if you haven't happened across them in a book, you probably don't know them... But there are probably many others that you do, instead. This test could easily hit a bunch you don't know and totally miss all the ones you do.
- sek 15y agoNon-Native speaker here. I found out that in almost all cases i knew a synonym of the words is didn't know. The problem is these are the ones that are used very frequently so i am rarely exposed to the other forms. While i know high literature in German, i must admit i just have read non-fiction in English so far. This is really a shame and i am going to change this. This test made me aware of that fact, regardless of it's scientific accuracy.
- crazygringo 15y agoHi, creator of the site here -- I worked for several years teaching English to foreigners, and my own (informal) statistical research has found that native and non-native language acquisition, while certainly somewhat different, is not tremendously different. I've run this test on Americans and Brazilians at all different levels, and the size of the progression from known to unknown words is rather consistent. That being said, cognates between languages can give an artificially inflated score. I intentionally avoided any words with the same roots in English and Portuguese (my second language), which should hopefully also be true for most Romance languages. This way, you shouldn't be able to "guess" meanings you've never actually learned. However, it wouldn't surprise me if German speakers, for example, were able to "guess" an additional number of words correctly. Also, the 60-80 words are only what you are tested on -- the word selection on pages 2-4 changes depending on your answers on the first page, so it attempts to narrow down your vocab knowledge "at the margin".
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- bliss 15y agoIf you found this test engaging, then it might be time to give this a go again... http://freerice.com/ http://freerice.com/
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- lawlit 15y ago"Is English your first (native) language, or a second (non-native) language?" my english is actually my 3rd non-native language :)
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoSpeaking English does not expand your vocabulary. You must read to encounter the larger portion of the dictionary. Does this test select for computer-users who don't read? 32800
- mkr-hn 15y ago23,700 27 year old native speaker in the US. I talk good English. I even properize capital nouns.
- jacis 15y agoThere were some obscure words in there. Interestingly, I only ticked boxes that I could envision Pip Boy (Fallout VG) drawings of. Ending up with a score of ~23k, which was below average.
- coolestuk 15y agohttp://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953 http://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953 37,100 I'm ashamed I didn't do better. I'm considerably older than the average HN reader. I did degrees in 4 different subjects (mind you, I was classed officially as retarded at my high school - in the same classes as the arsonists). So no-one should feel the score is that important. I'm a very mediocre programmer. I'd much rather halve my vocab score to double my maths ability.
- KevBurnsJr 15y agoYour sample is heavily skewed toward the literate. Add Education (None,HighS,BS,MS,PhD) as a research statistic and compare it to the national average. I would bet that your sample is greater than 2 Standard Deviations from the mean.
- scscsc 15y agoI got ~12K, but I highly doubt the accuracy... I suspect that I know ~1K words, maybe 2K. I remember hearing that people usually use around 100 or 200 distinct words/day. According to http://math.ucdenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/shakespeare.html http://math.ucdenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/shakespeare.html, Shakespeare used ~32K words in all of his works.
- johnsonjohnson 15y agoPutting aside all the comparing. Many non-native speakers here say they read and watch many things in english. I do that do and I'm quite positive that 95% of all the reading and listening I do each day is in english. Now with a low score of 17500 I wonder, if it isn't enough to completely endulge oneself in the language, what is? Of course, watching the Simpsons all day won't teach me some of the rarely used words. But there must be some stepping stones. I still haven't read Wuthering Heights because I don't want to have a dictionary lying around just to understand the story. And looking up something, reading on and forgetting it at the end of the day is quite common for me. Also I'm sure that 15 year old americans haven't read that many novels, still their vocabulary is supposed to be larger than most of the well read non-native speakers around here.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agohttp://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=endulge http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=endulge Sorry, couldn't resist. For a minute I thought I'd missed out on an alternate spelling. Then I realised that was unpossible ;0)>
- johnsonjohnson 15y agoToo bad, I'm not from Ohio. But this proves my point. Improve spelling? Increase vocabulary? It seems that swimming in the language isn't enough.
- crazygringo 15y agoSite creator here -- what a surprise to wake up this morning, see my inbox full of messages about this site, and discover that everyone was coming from Hacker News, which I visit every day! Thanks for all the participation, and comments -- I didn't submit this myself, so thanks, mike_esspe. I've responded to a few points down below; there's a lot more info on the details of the test at: http://testyourvocab.com/faq.php http://testyourvocab.com/faq.php http://testyourvocab.com/details.php http://testyourvocab.com/details.php
- rweba 15y agoHi crazygringo, I was intrigued by your estimation procedure and was thinking of a way of playing around with it: (1) Create a random bit vector of size 45,000. (2) Pick 40 positions in the vector at random and use those positions to estimate the proportion of ones in the original bit vector (so far this is easy). (3) Select an additional 120 positions and use the more sophisticated procedure to refine the estimate from part (2). I was wondering if you have code or pseudo-code for how you implemented part(3) specifically how you choose the 120 words for extra testing. It seems there are a lot of different natural ways you can do it. Did you write an academic paper about this? Thanks!
- antirez 15y agoI just just "5,340" as a result, this is an hint for me that I spend too much time trying to improve my hearing skills and too little trying to learn words outside the domain I mostly use English for (computers, programming, technology, ...). I wonder if there is some good web site that helps you learning new words. An iPhone application will also work for me, but I need one that is able to also tell me the sound of the word. I searched a bit in the past without good results.
- spreiti 15y ago7830 here. (Swiss-German native speaker) Like you I don't have enough exposure to other domains outside of programming and technology.
- joeyh 15y ago"Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of." This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context. Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the word used some 78 times in the past few months, and I'm sure I've encountered the word a few dozen times before. I know it's a slightly undesirable horse of some kind. Likely this means it's a gelding or a small pony-ish horse. Do I need to have looked up and remembered the three specific submeanings of the word, or that it's a specific breed of horse from Galloway to be able to say I am "exactly sure of" the word? I don't think that's how language works, but it's how this test seems to want it to work. My score of 35,300 is suspect on multiple levels.
- jonnathanson 15y agoSomething often missing from vocabulary tests -- and arguably more impressive than raw, crystallized vocab -- is the ability to deduce the meaning of new words on the fly, whether from context or absent any context (in which case, the meaning is ascertained from roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc.). I'd love to see a test of this skill. For instance, I doubt many people encounter the word "reck" in their daily lives. But I'd give props to someone whose brain would quickly draw the connection to the more frequently seen "reckless," thereby deducing that the word had something to do with caution or concern. Similarly, your point has some validity. Most of the time, we don't acquire language through reading the dictionary; we acquire it primarily through context in the course of reading or conversation. This is why, when pressed to define words, we'll often reach for a string of synonyms, or else provide usage in sample sentences. I bet few people here, let alone anywhere, could render dictionary-acceptable definitions of 99% of the words they know. (On the flipside, this is also why we forget most of the words we crammed in preparation for the SAT back in the day; we learned them completely out of context and in an artificial way).
- eavc 15y agoOne of my favorite things about reading on a Kindle is the ease with which I can look up words -- "garron" being one of the most recent, in fact.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- badclient 15y agoNon-natives who have studied English intently may well score higher than natives on a strictly vocab test like this.
- lucian1900 15y agoI only got 23k, I'm quite humbled. English is my second language and I'd hoped to have mastered it by now.
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- georgieporgie 15y agoI scored a mere 25,700-something. Based upon my ability to regularly, inadvertently stump spell-checkers and random humans alike, I will continue to assume that I have an above-average vocabulary. :-)
- dmazin 15y agoI moved to the US from Russia when I was 10, and my vocabulary is a pathetic 18,000 or so. Which is funny, because I consider myself pretty well-read. I usually just infer the meaning of new words through their context without looking them up so I don't feel comfortable saying I know the definition of those words.
- homemadejam 15y agoMy score was 10,700. Not too bad considering I'm dyslexic right?.... Right? :|
- qusiba 15y agoOh, I got only 16900. I think I will do the test again each year to see if I'm improving.
- derleth 15y ago38,800 here.
- bitanarch 15y ago20,700, Hong Kong Chinese living in the Bay Area.
- beseku 15y agoI scored far lower than I thought I would, and am genuinely surprised given that I tend to write a lot and have always thought I had a decent vocabulary. I would love to be able to compare my score to what it would have been before moving to a non-English country and learning/speaking a new language. I definitely feel that a large part of my memory is now dedicated to Japanese and not English...
- Mindful 15y agoI was actually a bit surprised, not by the specific number of words (that seems reasonably fair given some statistics posted above on this thread), but on the percentage ranking. I'm a doctoral student whose vocabulary score was in the 96th percentile on the GRE and I knew every word when I took the WAIS-IV. Here, my score of 28,300 is just a bit above average. Either people are lying (possible) or this curve is clearly not a normal curve representative of the population (most likely). I'm a pretty avid reader, even though most of the older authors like Dickens bore me (thanks ADD!), but the person that came up with those words is possibly the most voracious reader I have ever met. I also just realized that taking the test primed me to write in a way more intelligently sounding manner than I usually do. Not an LOL in sight!
- Pistos2 15y agoI scored only 20400, but it makes me ask myself: Perhaps I was being too honest? There were certainly words I'd seen before, and could make educated guesses as to the general meanings of, but I chose not to check those off. I'm Canadian born and raised, with English as my first language. Honestly, I'm surprised to be told I'm that far below the median and average.
- maurycy 15y agoNo matter how many I did (I'm fine, thanks), I would love to see a similar system that estimates one's vocabulary using already existing articles. To put aside the ego matters, I'm curious if there are any interesting correlations for writings published in magazines. For instance, between the estimated vocabulary size and the average price for ads (I bet that there is a huge correlation.)
- tommyudo 15y agoI took the opposite approach. I checked all the boxes on the first page but one, "vibrissae" (roughly, whiskers), and saw even more boxes on the second page and groaned. So I punted, and went back to the first page, reloaded it, and checked only one box: vibrissae. After finding 17 words on the second page, I left them all blank, following the same methodology. My vocabulary size was estimated to be 20 words. From this, I deduced that my total vocabulary size was all the words ever known to any English speaker anywhere, anytime - minus 20. This made me very pleased with myself, even though I knew my assumptions were pretty terrible. (Interesting that the spell check in my browser doesn't recognize vibrissae.)
- etfb 15y agoI'm a native speaker, and I got a server error. Does that mean I'm illiterate?
- lawn 15y agoI'm a non-native speaker and I fare pretty well with reading stuff but I'm a bit chocked at my result (< 19k). The thing I find a bit funny is that of all the words I didn't check I've seen almost all of them in books and articles. When I see them in a sentence and in context I do understand them fine but I can't give a definition for them. I wonder if this is common when reading another language? It might be a better idea to look up the words in a dictionary when seeing them but I just can't be bothered, after seeing them in context a few times I can usually get a feel for their meanings. There are a few exceptions to be sure, adjectives are particularly bad at this.