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It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The
by RicoElectrico 4mo ago
It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The distractor answers weren't convincing enough. For starters, when an answer was based on deconstructing the word into common English words, that ruled it out. After all, if it was, then it wouldn't have been obscure.
A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard. From the exams I know (excluding those whose nature precludes it, such as based on calculation or rote memorization) the only that does this brutally well is LEK (Polish medical graduate exam). It's nigh impossible to vibe guess it at more than random chance for someone outside the field.
- _diyar 4mo agoin casual use you might also be able to guess it from context, so i think it’s a wash
- datsci_est_2015 4mo agoYeah I also got exactly 74k. Stuff like “xylologist” I guessed had to do with vegetation because of “xylem”, whereas xylophone player was too on the nose. Then again, maybe knowing xylem in the first place makes 74k reasonable.
- mpeg 4mo agoYeah I guessed that one right because xylophone player sounded like a trap. I don't understand how they rank words though, some extremely common words like xenophobia were ranked as high as much more obscure ones.
- rationalist 4mo ago66k for me, but I didn't get that word, instead I got ones like Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Flibbertigibbet, and Brobdingnagian... which the latter two interestingly do show up in my keyboard's word completion suggestions.
- BenjiWiebe 4mo agoI've encountered flibbertigibbet and Brobdingnagian. Never encountered hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia before, at least I don't remember encountering it. Flibbertigibbet appears in some of the Little House on the Prairie (Laura and Mary) books, if I remember right. And I've also read Gulliver's Travels which is where Brobdingnagian comes from. Brobdingnag was a land of giants. Pretty sure I've seen the word used elsewhere though.
- abnry 4mo agoI knew Flibbertigibbet from the sound of music: MARGARETTA: How do you find a word that means Maria? BERTHE: A flibberti gibbet! SOPHIA: A willo' the wisp! MARGARETTA: A clown!
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- fittingopposite 4mo agoHaha. Yeah I figured Xylo- (wood) + sth. related to mono-poly so wood-seller made sense. Never have heard of this word before
- pclmulqdq 4mo agoI think the test was vibe coded, because a xylologist is someone who studies wood, not someone who sells wood. I am not sure if "xylolgist" was the exact word, though. xylo- = wood; -logy = study Indeed from M-W: "a branch of dendrology dealing with the gross and the minute structure of wood"
- fittingopposite 4mo agoSeems to be a hapax legomenon https://www.oed.com/dictionary/xylopolist_n https://www.oed.com/dictionary/xylopolist_n "OED's only evidence for xylopolist is from 1656, in the writing of Thomas Blount, antiquary and lexicographer."
- pclmulqdq 4mo agoThat test had several hapax legomena on it, so it would make sense.
- onionisafruit 4mo agoIt would have been nice to have an “i don’t know” button. Instead I decided to select the first option for words I didn’t know instead of trying to figure them out. Although when I got to the final group I couldn’t resist trying to figure them out. It estimated 61k for me.
- vova_hn2 4mo ago> A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard. In case of online quiz you can have a "competition" between distractors: 1. start by having much more distractors than needed and pick randomly 2. for each measure the probability of it getting clicked (clicks/times it's shown) 3. show the most frequently clicked distractors more often
- RicoElectrico 4mo agoYeah, as I researched the topic of multiple choice exam design, seems the rule of thumb is to reject outright any distractors that are chosen by less than 5% of test takers.
- scubbo 4mo agoIndeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!
- superjan 4mo agoWhat I also noticed: when there are two contradictory definitions to choose from, it is usually one of those two. For all its shortcomings, this was part of the fun, deducing the likely correct answer when you see a word for the first time.