How many of the 170k English words do you know?

Posted by abnry 7 days ago

How many of the 170k English words do you know?(vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app)

501 points | 554 commentspage 13

apimade 7 days ago|

Pick the longest answer, you’re right 97% of the time.

This is true of any LLM-generated quiz.

Walf 7 days ago|

And it'll be one of the two choices that directly contradict each other.

benob 7 days ago||

Longest definition and semi-columns are strong biases for right answer. Also, my run contained a lot of adjectives for which it is pretty obvious that noun definitions do not match.

piekvorst 7 days ago||

English being my language of choice, but not my first language, I got 75/100. Performance breakdown: 18/20, 18/20, 11/20, 18/20, 10/20.

(My first language is Russian.)

4gotunameagain 7 days ago|

84/100, also English as a second language. Language of choice in technical stuff, mother tongue in abstract and emotional

iandanforth 6 days ago||

Even though it said ""Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?" it still estimates I know less than half the English vocabulary. Humbling.

femto 7 days ago||

I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.

mpeg 7 days ago||

Yeah I got 75k~ and did something similar ... most of the expert and grandmaster ones had at least 1 or 2 obvious incorrect answers, then it was a 50/50 so I usually went for the thing that sounded either closer to the root of the word or completely left-field

Anything up to expert was obvious

WithinReason 7 days ago||

Also, just pick the longest answer :)

paduc 6 days ago||

As a French speaker, I think I’m advantaged for the difficult words (which are very often of French/latin origin).

I scored 74 400 and I’m nowhere near English-native.

firefoxd 7 days ago||

Good thing I read this post this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664

air7 7 days ago||

With the risk of giving a spoiler, it seems the correct answer is almost always the longer, more elaborate one.

I would guess this causes an up shift in results even if not consciously noticed.

miqkt 7 days ago|

Only scored 93... One of those, "yclept" I've never ever encountered before (as a native Australian English speaker) and only lucked out by way of elimination.

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