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Ghent University Vocabulary Test

43 points by zhte415 12y ago

yread 12y ago
for science! Non-native: 81% EDIT: and 0 non-words
- hornd 12y ago
  Pretty impressive! Native speaker: 69%. Leaned on the side of `no`: 0 non word yesses at least.
  - pc86 12y ago
    Yes given the admonishment about "heavy penalties" at the beginning I hit no on any word I was on the fence about (and accidentally when I got to "triennially"). 71% as a native speaker.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
didgeoridoo 12y ago
Native; 93%. Missed: rood, ceil, catchfly, slickens, tuberculation Some of those non-words were gorgeous: costyhibbles, neatherden, quiffiness, concodion
- alexandros 12y ago
  Maybe they should spin their word generator off into a domain name finder?
- viraptor 12y ago
  Quiffiness looks like a perfectly cromulent word.
sean_the_geek 12y ago
non-native : 67% It's good to hear that I know 67% of English words.
fredley 12y ago
Native, 84%. I missed 'pshaw', but 'myeah' is apparently a non-word!
- theophrastus 12y ago
  same for me. however they declared "clead" to be a non-word and well, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clead http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clead makes one wonder how well their database would score against the OED
fchollet 12y ago
Non native, 81%. I think the test might be easier for non-natives speaking european native languages, as they cumulate etymological understanding from several languages.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  I'd also guess that non-native speakers are less likely to say "yes" to fake words. Non-native speakers are, presumably, more self-aware of the extents and limitations of their English vocabularies. Native speakers seem more likely to succumb to issues of vanity, overconfidence, or bet-hedging on this sort of test.
coriny 12y ago
OK, I failed this test before I even got to it. Apparently you are only allowed to put one country in the "Where did you grow up in?" question. I don't know why they aren't interested in the verbal abilities of the large number of people whose parents weren't sedentary - e.g. military, mining industry, diplomats, aid, disaster, mega-construction etc etc. /whine over. EDIT: Also, no way to communicate this flaw to them (I'm not on Twitter).
- Luc 12y ago
  Oops, you closed the whine tag too early!
  - coriny 12y ago
    I know! That's annoying me as well! ;)
- pc86 12y ago
  Well, there is a way to communicate this flaw to them. You've just chosen not to participate in that medium.
  - coriny 12y ago
    True. I could also walk over to the place and tell them in person (after a flight and a drive etc). My thoughts are that if you are asking people to volunteer to contribute, expecting people to sign up to a third party in order to communicate is not "frictionless". After all, there is thing called email that's been around for a while and is used by, pretty much, everyone. Also post forms. The main reason for using Twitter (my belief) is to get your users to promote you for free.
- codeulike 12y ago
  Because having a multi-select plays havoc with stats.
  - judk 12y ago
bitexploder 12y ago
90%. Native speaker. The non words were gems, blurishness... why did I say yes to that?
- Smaug123 12y ago
  But "gems" is a word - as in "gemstones".
  - Dragonai 12y ago
    Haha you may have parsed bitexploder's comment slightly incorrectly. > The non words were gems, blurishness... why did I say yes to that? Try reading that as: > The non words were gems. Blurishness... why did I say yes to that?
impy 12y ago
Non Native: 69%. Took Iter as a non word. Been using that too much as a name in programming I guess. Been too trigger happy on the 'f' key with a few words I did know though.
yread 12y ago
related http://testyourvocab.com/ http://testyourvocab.com/
namenotrequired 12y ago
Non native, 67%.
Lord_DeathMatch 12y ago
Can't seem to progress beyond the initial press yes or no screen, with no js errors in the console. Odd.
xchip 12y ago
Non native, 73%. 0 non words. accurse, glycol, propitiation, tumescence, landlocked, klystron, squab, blithesome, lacertian, dingbat, gradate, adjudge, microsomal, latescence, intercut, aviary, semis, vie, dollarfish But given that Shakespeare wrote all his books with about 1k5 words this test doesn't proof much :)
judk 12y ago
Apropos, the title spells Ghent differently from the domain name.
- impy 12y ago
  Ghent is the English translation of the Belgian city Gent.
fecund 12y ago
It seems I know 90% of English language words and it is extremely unlikely that I know that many. I believe the numbers are off by a large margin. I would love to look how they arrive at those estimates.
reedlaw 12y ago
The non-words are pretty easy to spot. On my first try I marked any word I was uncertain of as a non-word. I got a 75% with zero false positives. I looked at all the words that I marked as non-words and saw that most of them I had suspected were real words. Then I tried it again with an increased confidence and got 90% with zero false positives.
sosuke 12y ago
The non-words threw me off the first time because I wasn't expecting them to be there. By the end of the test I felt like I didn't know enough English; scored 89%.
- will_work4tears 12y ago
  Yeah, same here, I got 89% of the real words, but messed up with 4-5 non-words which lowered my score to 76%.
djf1 12y ago
It seems to me, that much personal information should be transmitted over a secure connection.
anathebealio 12y ago
I wish they had the statistics available for people who complete the test. It would be interesting to look at how native speakers and non native speakers differ.
super_mario 12y ago
Non-native speaker, got 93%. But English is almost like my first language. I haven't spoken anything else for decades, even though I speak 3 other languages, and think, dream and express myself best in English.
sbirch 12y ago
I enjoyed reading some of their results. I see some methodological issues here, however: 1) The test makes you distinguish between real words and a set of words they've made up in some way. As others have pointed out, some of them are pretty obvious non-words. I would expect the results to change depending on the method used to generate non-words. 2) Measuring the performance of a binary classification is a well studied problem with many metrics and approaches to quantifying performance (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_classification#Evaluation_of_binary_classifiers http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_classification#Evaluat...). Subtracting the false positive rate from the true positive rate is not among them. The final score is not a consistent estimator of the fraction of words in their corpus you know.
josephlord 12y ago
I tried to only answer yes when I knew what the words meant rather than guessing. I also said "bubba", "bumf" and "nonsuccess" weren't words which it disagreed with. Most of the other things that I didn't get were from biology. "lymphoid" (guessed it might have been a word but hadn't heard it so entered no), "dabchick" etc. "bubba" and "bumf" are interesting ones as they ask the question of where the language ends and local dialects and slang begin (or are local dialects and slang within the language in which case an exhaustive list is impossible).
- jameshart 12y ago
  Interesting, for me, to see 'bumf', because even though I recognize the word from my English dialect (Southern UK, originally), I'd mark that form as a nonword because I feel it's spelled wrong: I would write it 'bumph'. I have no idea why I would feel so strongly about that, though, because I can't imagine it's a word I've written or seen written down particularly frequently...
  - josephlord 12y ago
    I don't think I've seen "bumf" written down but I've certainly heard it a few times.
ForHackernews 12y ago
A lot of these were strange formations of regular words. For example, I said I didn't know "symphonize and "discussible" because I have never ever seen either form used anywhere. But obviously, I know the words "symphony" and "discuss" so I can infer their meaning from the suffixes.
debugunit 12y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183
nodata 12y ago
Why did they make the interface so tricky? I think they're testing two things here...
- koffiezet 12y ago
  They also test response time, they want to make it an easy left/right decision to record the time it takes to recognize a word.
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
Native speaker and did 77% and 94% the first and second times respectively. My favourite "non-words" though would have to be "meedcave" and "cunstalize". I'm not quite sure what "cunstalize" would mean, but I feel like I desperately need a meedcave.

43 points by zhte415 12y ago

yread 12y ago

for science! Non-native: 81% EDIT: and 0 non-words

hornd 12y ago
Pretty impressive! Native speaker: 69%. Leaned on the side of `no`: 0 non word yesses at least.
- pc86 12y ago
  Yes given the admonishment about "heavy penalties" at the beginning I hit no on any word I was on the fence about (and accidentally when I got to "triennially"). 71% as a native speaker.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

didgeoridoo 12y ago

Native; 93%. Missed: rood, ceil, catchfly, slickens, tuberculation Some of those non-words were gorgeous: costyhibbles, neatherden, quiffiness, concodion

alexandros 12y ago
Maybe they should spin their word generator off into a domain name finder?
viraptor 12y ago
Quiffiness looks like a perfectly cromulent word.

sean_the_geek 12y ago

non-native : 67% It's good to hear that I know 67% of English words.

fredley 12y ago

Native, 84%. I missed 'pshaw', but 'myeah' is apparently a non-word!

theophrastus 12y ago
same for me. however they declared "clead" to be a non-word and well, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clead http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clead makes one wonder how well their database would score against the OED

fchollet 12y ago

Non native, 81%. I think the test might be easier for non-natives speaking european native languages, as they cumulate etymological understanding from several languages.

jonnathanson 12y ago
I'd also guess that non-native speakers are less likely to say "yes" to fake words. Non-native speakers are, presumably, more self-aware of the extents and limitations of their English vocabularies. Native speakers seem more likely to succumb to issues of vanity, overconfidence, or bet-hedging on this sort of test.

coriny 12y ago

OK, I failed this test before I even got to it. Apparently you are only allowed to put one country in the "Where did you grow up in?" question. I don't know why they aren't interested in the verbal abilities of the large number of people whose parents weren't sedentary - e.g. military, mining industry, diplomats, aid, disaster, mega-construction etc etc. /whine over. EDIT: Also, no way to communicate this flaw to them (I'm not on Twitter).

Luc 12y ago
Oops, you closed the whine tag too early!
- coriny 12y ago
  I know! That's annoying me as well! ;)
pc86 12y ago
Well, there is a way to communicate this flaw to them. You've just chosen not to participate in that medium.
- coriny 12y ago
  True. I could also walk over to the place and tell them in person (after a flight and a drive etc). My thoughts are that if you are asking people to volunteer to contribute, expecting people to sign up to a third party in order to communicate is not "frictionless". After all, there is thing called email that's been around for a while and is used by, pretty much, everyone. Also post forms. The main reason for using Twitter (my belief) is to get your users to promote you for free.
codeulike 12y ago
Because having a multi-select plays havoc with stats.
- judk 12y ago

bitexploder 12y ago

90%. Native speaker. The non words were gems, blurishness... why did I say yes to that?

Smaug123 12y ago
But "gems" is a word - as in "gemstones".
- Dragonai 12y ago
  Haha you may have parsed bitexploder's comment slightly incorrectly. > The non words were gems, blurishness... why did I say yes to that? Try reading that as: > The non words were gems. Blurishness... why did I say yes to that?

impy 12y ago

Non Native: 69%. Took Iter as a non word. Been using that too much as a name in programming I guess. Been too trigger happy on the 'f' key with a few words I did know though.

yread 12y ago

related http://testyourvocab.com/ http://testyourvocab.com/

namenotrequired 12y ago

Non native, 67%.

Lord_DeathMatch 12y ago

Can't seem to progress beyond the initial press yes or no screen, with no js errors in the console. Odd.

xchip 12y ago

Non native, 73%. 0 non words. accurse, glycol, propitiation, tumescence, landlocked, klystron, squab, blithesome, lacertian, dingbat, gradate, adjudge, microsomal, latescence, intercut, aviary, semis, vie, dollarfish But given that Shakespeare wrote all his books with about 1k5 words this test doesn't proof much :)

judk 12y ago

Apropos, the title spells Ghent differently from the domain name.

impy 12y ago
Ghent is the English translation of the Belgian city Gent.

fecund 12y ago

It seems I know 90% of English language words and it is extremely unlikely that I know that many. I believe the numbers are off by a large margin. I would love to look how they arrive at those estimates.

reedlaw 12y ago

The non-words are pretty easy to spot. On my first try I marked any word I was uncertain of as a non-word. I got a 75% with zero false positives. I looked at all the words that I marked as non-words and saw that most of them I had suspected were real words. Then I tried it again with an increased confidence and got 90% with zero false positives.

sosuke 12y ago

The non-words threw me off the first time because I wasn't expecting them to be there. By the end of the test I felt like I didn't know enough English; scored 89%.

will_work4tears 12y ago
Yeah, same here, I got 89% of the real words, but messed up with 4-5 non-words which lowered my score to 76%.

djf1 12y ago

It seems to me, that much personal information should be transmitted over a secure connection.

anathebealio 12y ago

I wish they had the statistics available for people who complete the test. It would be interesting to look at how native speakers and non native speakers differ.

super_mario 12y ago

Non-native speaker, got 93%. But English is almost like my first language. I haven't spoken anything else for decades, even though I speak 3 other languages, and think, dream and express myself best in English.

sbirch 12y ago

I enjoyed reading some of their results. I see some methodological issues here, however: 1) The test makes you distinguish between real words and a set of words they've made up in some way. As others have pointed out, some of them are pretty obvious non-words. I would expect the results to change depending on the method used to generate non-words. 2) Measuring the performance of a binary classification is a well studied problem with many metrics and approaches to quantifying performance (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_classification#Evaluation_of_binary_classifiers http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_classification#Evaluat...). Subtracting the false positive rate from the true positive rate is not among them. The final score is not a consistent estimator of the fraction of words in their corpus you know.

josephlord 12y ago

I tried to only answer yes when I knew what the words meant rather than guessing. I also said "bubba", "bumf" and "nonsuccess" weren't words which it disagreed with. Most of the other things that I didn't get were from biology. "lymphoid" (guessed it might have been a word but hadn't heard it so entered no), "dabchick" etc. "bubba" and "bumf" are interesting ones as they ask the question of where the language ends and local dialects and slang begin (or are local dialects and slang within the language in which case an exhaustive list is impossible).

jameshart 12y ago
Interesting, for me, to see 'bumf', because even though I recognize the word from my English dialect (Southern UK, originally), I'd mark that form as a nonword because I feel it's spelled wrong: I would write it 'bumph'. I have no idea why I would feel so strongly about that, though, because I can't imagine it's a word I've written or seen written down particularly frequently...
- josephlord 12y ago
  I don't think I've seen "bumf" written down but I've certainly heard it a few times.

ForHackernews 12y ago

A lot of these were strange formations of regular words. For example, I said I didn't know "symphonize and "discussible" because I have never ever seen either form used anywhere. But obviously, I know the words "symphony" and "discuss" so I can infer their meaning from the suffixes.

debugunit 12y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183

nodata 12y ago

Why did they make the interface so tricky? I think they're testing two things here...

koffiezet 12y ago
They also test response time, they want to make it an easy left/right decision to record the time it takes to recognize a word.

Patrick_Devine 12y ago

Native speaker and did 77% and 94% the first and second times respectively. My favourite "non-words" though would have to be "meedcave" and "cunstalize". I'm not quite sure what "cunstalize" would mean, but I feel like I desperately need a meedcave.