4 ms·

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 c

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 word) was characterized as intermediate but I think it's much more obscure and less obvious than that; Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was used as a word (I got that wrong as well) - any type of 'phobia' word is really the sort of thing a fourth grader opens up a page in the dictionary and points out, not a word that is used... ever; metamorphosis and kinetic were labeled expert, which I don't agree with (what elementary schooler doesn't learn about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly? what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?). Most words were reasonably well defined in a way that most people would understand or recognize. A few words had poor definitions: lethargy ("the state of being lethargic" - obvious); complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug); magnanimous ("generous toward a rival" - I disagree that a rival must be involved); gauche ("socially awkward" - this is sort of close but the given definition completely misses the idea of being tactless). They call it scientific and give a hand-wavey formula, but they don't explain how words are stratified in the first place. If stratified sampling is a formally recognized method of doing this, it would be nice to have a link to a real reference. I think I know a lot of words, but I am skeptical of the estimate this app provided (north of 75k).

gerdesj 4mo ago
"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" Hippopotamus does mean river horse and I was caught out by that (note the o instead of a in ...poto...). I think that word is really a joke - lol - a bit like floccinausilihilipilification, which I wont bother looking up the speling 4.
- alienbaby 4mo ago
  I was gonna say, you spelled that wrong :p
- andrewflnr 4mo ago
  Various sources suggest it's a literal joke, e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hippopotomonstrosesquipedalio...
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
montag 4mo ago
The test hardly seems adaptive (if at all) and yet it made the HN front page. That’s impressive.
- ralferoo 4mo ago
  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...
alienbaby 4mo ago
69400 for me, and I knew I fucked up on ~ 5 I really did know.. or perhaps I didn't know them as well as I thought?
trebligdivad 4mo ago
Yeh, it had 'kerfuffle' as one of the last words but that's very common. Yet it had Zenzizenzizenzic (which I'd never heard of but I think I guessed it right) It really could do with a summary showing the answers you made and corrections for what you got wrong.
- wingmanjd 4mo ago
  Ha, a Wikipedia article link to Zenzizenzizenzic was on HN earlier today! I don't think I would have gotten that one right otherwise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664
- kurthr 4mo ago
  Yep, 'panacea' was grandmaster, but 'quire' was intermediate?
  - mr_toad 4mo ago
    The dictionary they’re using seems to pre-date the printing press.
kevin_thibedeau 4mo ago
> what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy? 95% of Americans.
- buzzerbetrayed 4mo ago
  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.
  - Antoniocl 4mo ago
    Oh interesting, is it actually covered as part of the standard compulsory public school curriculum? Genuinely surprised, because here in Canada (Ontario) it's covered as an elective in 11th grade physics, which roughly 15/120 people in my graduating class opted to take.
    - derektank 4mo ago
      Each state maintains its own public school curriculum, so generalizing about US education in the first place is a fool’s errand. But certainly in many states, students will take a generic science course covering the basics of Newtonian mechanics, the periodic table, and Mendelian genetics in middle school (roughly ages 12-14) before more specialized courses become available in high school, such as Physics or Biology where these subjects would be covered in greater depth and breadth.
    - LtWorf 4mo ago
      I think the generic idea of kinetic energy can be explained much much earlier and to everyone, while how to calculate it can come later on.
  - naishoya 4mo ago
    Perhaps they were taught about it, but did they learn it? Have they retained that knowledge beyond the test at the end of the semester? Anecdotal observations would imply that they have indeed been taught it, and indeed have failed to retain the concept. I have no rigorous data regarding either; but the generally poor outcomes which appear as result of a lack of retention of scientific, math, socio-economic, and anthropological instruction do seem self evident both from within and outside of the US, in headlines and actions, writ large and for all to see. Is the problem the use of teaching methods which focus on short-term memorization rather than conceptual comprehension? Is it the lack of support for instructors? Is it a lack of focus in the student body? Is it some or all of the above in varying degree? Or something else entirely?
julianeon 4mo ago
I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good. Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: it's not that you're expected to know the whole word, but they're looking for you to recognize components of it and infer the meaning from that. I knew sesquippedalian (sometimes jokingly used in "long word" contexts) so that was easy: but phobia is also easily identifiable, and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome). So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice. Complacent and gauche: have heard both these uses, I think that's straightforwardly correct. If this was a dictionary that would, at worst, be the 2nd or 3rd definition. No complaints. Source: I used to place in spelling bees and could've been a contender but I didn't have the discipline to study the dictionary for hours on the weekends, which is the next level.
- bbor 4mo ago
  For explicit comparison: kinetic and metamorphosis are ~10x as common as breviary, and 10,000x as common as hippo…. See NGRAMs: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia%2C+metamorphosis%2Ckinetic&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHip...
- hatthew 4mo ago
  To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia
  - duskwuff 4mo ago
    Yes. It is a word which seems to only be used as an example of a long and obscure word. I have never heard it used expressively, other than as a joke.
asah 4mo ago
I used <tab> and <space> and left the mouse hovering over the continue button, and it went very quickly.
bbor 4mo ago
Not to bring up the topic de jure too early, but this seems like a very lazy usage of AI. Especially egregious when it’s to redo something that’s been done a thousand times…
deejaaymac 4mo ago
"what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?" A lot of them, because being an anti-intellectual is 'cool'
da_grift_shift 4mo ago
Unfortunate bullshit asymmetry here. Taking the time to thoughtfully point out inaccuracies in a piece of vibesludge excreted in seconds.
- herodoturtle 4mo ago
  “vibesludge” ^_^ hah what a great word, first time seeing it. Another one I came across recently - “sloptimization”
Muskwalker 4mo ago
> complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug) I agree that it doesn't seem 'smug', but weirdly both dictionary dot com and Wiktionary give 'smug' as a synonym or part of the definition. But they also analyze 'smug' as equivalent to self-satisfied or self-complacent, so maybe that's the word whose meaning is not as expected. (I would think of "smug" less as "self-" anything - it implies a relation, it's more like exulting in a superior situation one has over someone. And 'complacent' is at base being content with one's situation, but often with the negative implication that one should be acting to make things better instead)
- n4r9 4mo ago
  In my mind "complacent" means the opposite of "pro-active" - not taking actions or decisions in the face of an issue. That could be because of feeling panicked or uncertain. So I was also surprised by the "smug" and "self-satisfied" parts.
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    I don’t get the smug. But complacent has always has the “self-satisfied” and “a bit lazy”. Not exactly what is in your comment, but someone that is rooted in his behavior, but not for stubbornness or arrogance, just “it is ok that way because I’m happy and there’s no reason to change”
taffydavid 4mo ago
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
- balazspeczeli 4mo ago
  Does the ability to guess the meaning of a word (from four options or context) is the same as knowing the word and using it in your speech?
  - d0mine 4mo ago
    It is more like an ability to recognize the word when it is used in context. I got ~1/3 that is very generous estimate even for "recall" case (recognize), and it obviously false for the "generate" case (using in speech) where I guess my vocabulary is likely ~1/90 of all English words.
  - taffydavid 4mo ago
    No, absolutely not, and that's my point. A real test would be having to type the definition, or pick from ten options
    - GolfPopper 4mo ago
      I think that picking the correct (or most correct, which is trickier) use of the word in context (out of, as you say, many options) might be a good way to test for receptive vocabulary.
  - GolfPopper 4mo ago
    It is not. Vocabulary is far from the binary of "you know this word or you don't". At a minimum, it is usually split into passive and active vocabulary, with passive being the words you understand when encountered, and active being the words you can use effectively. Wikipedia's entry is a pretty good overview.
- 4mo ago
ggorlen 4mo ago
[dead]
camillomiller 4mo ago
My man, it’s a slippy sloppy app claude coded possibly in an afternoon at best…
mhdhejazi 3mo ago
One interesting observation: If you’re unsure of the correct answer, select the longest option, and you’re almost always correct!

gerdesj 4mo ago

"Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" Hippopotamus does mean river horse and I was caught out by that (note the o instead of a in ...poto...). I think that word is really a joke - lol - a bit like floccinausilihilipilification, which I wont bother looking up the speling 4.

alienbaby 4mo ago
I was gonna say, you spelled that wrong :p
andrewflnr 4mo ago
Various sources suggest it's a literal joke, e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hippopotomonstrosesquipedalio...

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

montag 4mo ago

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

ralferoo 4mo ago
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...

alienbaby 4mo ago

69400 for me, and I knew I fucked up on ~ 5 I really did know.. or perhaps I didn't know them as well as I thought?

trebligdivad 4mo ago

Yeh, it had 'kerfuffle' as one of the last words but that's very common. Yet it had Zenzizenzizenzic (which I'd never heard of but I think I guessed it right) It really could do with a summary showing the answers you made and corrections for what you got wrong.

wingmanjd 4mo ago
Ha, a Wikipedia article link to Zenzizenzizenzic was on HN earlier today! I don't think I would have gotten that one right otherwise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664
kurthr 4mo ago
Yep, 'panacea' was grandmaster, but 'quire' was intermediate?
- mr_toad 4mo ago
  The dictionary they’re using seems to pre-date the printing press.

kevin_thibedeau 4mo ago

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

buzzerbetrayed 4mo ago
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.
- Antoniocl 4mo ago
  Oh interesting, is it actually covered as part of the standard compulsory public school curriculum? Genuinely surprised, because here in Canada (Ontario) it's covered as an elective in 11th grade physics, which roughly 15/120 people in my graduating class opted to take.
  - derektank 4mo ago
    Each state maintains its own public school curriculum, so generalizing about US education in the first place is a fool’s errand. But certainly in many states, students will take a generic science course covering the basics of Newtonian mechanics, the periodic table, and Mendelian genetics in middle school (roughly ages 12-14) before more specialized courses become available in high school, such as Physics or Biology where these subjects would be covered in greater depth and breadth.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    I think the generic idea of kinetic energy can be explained much much earlier and to everyone, while how to calculate it can come later on.
- naishoya 4mo ago
  Perhaps they were taught about it, but did they learn it? Have they retained that knowledge beyond the test at the end of the semester? Anecdotal observations would imply that they have indeed been taught it, and indeed have failed to retain the concept. I have no rigorous data regarding either; but the generally poor outcomes which appear as result of a lack of retention of scientific, math, socio-economic, and anthropological instruction do seem self evident both from within and outside of the US, in headlines and actions, writ large and for all to see. Is the problem the use of teaching methods which focus on short-term memorization rather than conceptual comprehension? Is it the lack of support for instructors? Is it a lack of focus in the student body? Is it some or all of the above in varying degree? Or something else entirely?

julianeon 4mo ago

I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good. Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: it's not that you're expected to know the whole word, but they're looking for you to recognize components of it and infer the meaning from that. I knew sesquippedalian (sometimes jokingly used in "long word" contexts) so that was easy: but phobia is also easily identifiable, and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome). So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice. Complacent and gauche: have heard both these uses, I think that's straightforwardly correct. If this was a dictionary that would, at worst, be the 2nd or 3rd definition. No complaints. Source: I used to place in spelling bees and could've been a contender but I didn't have the discipline to study the dictionary for hours on the weekends, which is the next level.

bbor 4mo ago
For explicit comparison: kinetic and metamorphosis are ~10x as common as breviary, and 10,000x as common as hippo…. See NGRAMs: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia%2C+metamorphosis%2Ckinetic&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHip...
hatthew 4mo ago
To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia
- duskwuff 4mo ago
  Yes. It is a word which seems to only be used as an example of a long and obscure word. I have never heard it used expressively, other than as a joke.

asah 4mo ago

I used <tab> and <space> and left the mouse hovering over the continue button, and it went very quickly.

bbor 4mo ago

Not to bring up the topic de jure too early, but this seems like a very lazy usage of AI. Especially egregious when it’s to redo something that’s been done a thousand times…

deejaaymac 4mo ago

"what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?" A lot of them, because being an anti-intellectual is 'cool'

da_grift_shift 4mo ago

Unfortunate bullshit asymmetry here. Taking the time to thoughtfully point out inaccuracies in a piece of vibesludge excreted in seconds.

herodoturtle 4mo ago
“vibesludge” ^_^ hah what a great word, first time seeing it. Another one I came across recently - “sloptimization”

Muskwalker 4mo ago

> complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug) I agree that it doesn't seem 'smug', but weirdly both dictionary dot com and Wiktionary give 'smug' as a synonym or part of the definition. But they also analyze 'smug' as equivalent to self-satisfied or self-complacent, so maybe that's the word whose meaning is not as expected. (I would think of "smug" less as "self-" anything - it implies a relation, it's more like exulting in a superior situation one has over someone. And 'complacent' is at base being content with one's situation, but often with the negative implication that one should be acting to make things better instead)

n4r9 4mo ago
In my mind "complacent" means the opposite of "pro-active" - not taking actions or decisions in the face of an issue. That could be because of feeling panicked or uncertain. So I was also surprised by the "smug" and "self-satisfied" parts.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  I don’t get the smug. But complacent has always has the “self-satisfied” and “a bit lazy”. Not exactly what is in your comment, but someone that is rooted in his behavior, but not for stubbornness or arrogance, just “it is ok that way because I’m happy and there’s no reason to change”

taffydavid 4mo ago

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

balazspeczeli 4mo ago
Does the ability to guess the meaning of a word (from four options or context) is the same as knowing the word and using it in your speech?
- d0mine 4mo ago
  It is more like an ability to recognize the word when it is used in context. I got ~1/3 that is very generous estimate even for "recall" case (recognize), and it obviously false for the "generate" case (using in speech) where I guess my vocabulary is likely ~1/90 of all English words.
- taffydavid 4mo ago
  No, absolutely not, and that's my point. A real test would be having to type the definition, or pick from ten options
  - GolfPopper 4mo ago
    I think that picking the correct (or most correct, which is trickier) use of the word in context (out of, as you say, many options) might be a good way to test for receptive vocabulary.
- GolfPopper 4mo ago
  It is not. Vocabulary is far from the binary of "you know this word or you don't". At a minimum, it is usually split into passive and active vocabulary, with passive being the words you understand when encountered, and active being the words you can use effectively. Wikipedia's entry is a pretty good overview.
4mo ago

ggorlen 4mo ago

[dead]

camillomiller 4mo ago

My man, it’s a slippy sloppy app claude coded possibly in an afternoon at best…

mhdhejazi 3mo ago

One interesting observation: If you’re unsure of the correct answer, select the longest option, and you’re almost always correct!