Top
Best
New

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 14
Liftyee 7 days ago|
Far too slow to complete and too many clicks. I'm surprised it's not using a binary search method easy-hard-easy ... Then it could show an in progress metric.
walthamstow 7 days ago||
76250, or 93/100. Native English speaker from London. Some of the last 10 words were seriously obscure.

Are accoutrement and ziggurat really English words? Accoutrement is even pronounced as French!

stavros 7 days ago||
Depending on what you consider an "English" word, anywhere from 0% to 100% of words are English words. I've definitely seen accoutrement and ziggurat in English, and quite often.
walthamstow 7 days ago||
Of course, the line is very blurry. I've used accoutrement(s) in English many times, but I've never considered myself to be speaking English when I use it. It's like joie de vivre or c'est la vie.
stavros 7 days ago||
What about "rendezvous", or "etiquette", or "RSVP", cliche, nuance, etc? Do you consider those French or English?

As you say, the line is very very blurry.

naishoya 7 days ago|||
My favorite in the vicinity of etiquette and rendezvous is the "double entendre", very French sounding, but not French at all. That and something being not a person's "forte" which when correctly pronounced is just fort, but through confabulation with a musical term from Italian; forte: to play loudly, sounds more French to English speakers when mispronounced. C'est la vie.

Japanese loanwords really tickle my humour; バイト "Baito" : a casual, part-time, non-serious job. From the German "Arbeit" which is serious, macro-level employment or exertion.

walthamstow 7 days ago|||
Rendezvous and cliche yes. Nuance, etiquette, RSVP no. It's instinctive so I can't explain but maybe because rendezvous and cliche require using French pronounciation. On this I think you could find more differing opinions than there are possible answers.
Glyptodon 7 days ago|||
Those are both on the list of words I thought should have been in a category or two lower because I consider them both sufficiently widely used.
melasadra 7 days ago|||
Weirdly enough, these words would be known to some non-native speakers as they show up every now and then in video games.
goodpoint 7 days ago||
I did 78000 and I'm not a native English speaker.
testemailfordg2 7 days ago||
Gave it a try and got 78 correct out of 100, so it extrapolated it to me knowing about 55k+ words and saying most native speakers only get 15k - 35k...Interesting
alok-g 7 days ago|
Mine was very similar.

Given this ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603397 ... I now wonder if the actual corrected estimate from it is even higher at 110K+, which would seem further off.

yreg 7 days ago||
Please move the continue button closer to the options. I had to make my window smaller to avoid having to run between them with the mouse.

Also add a keyboard focus state on the continue button.

ThePowerOfFuet 7 days ago||
WAY too many clicks per word. One, max.

The green button (which should not exist) was also hidden under Firefox for Android's address bar until I tried to "scroll* to hide it.

jcd000 6 days ago||
90/100 and 13/20 expert & 17/20 gm. Not too bad for a non-native speaker (but I've read books in english daily for years)
cyberax 7 days ago||
The initial section is way too long. Perhaps do an exponential difficulty increase?

I got 93 words (not a native speaker), but the expert/grandmaster words were kinda easy?

himata4113 7 days ago||
Fascinating how many of the words I didn't know, but got correct from how they sound in my head which makes be believe this test is flawed.
SSLy 7 days ago||
70k, which I believe is a fine result for a second language.
smitty1e 7 days ago|
Good work. I was slightly below that as a native speaker with 88 correct.
wazoox 7 days ago|
81500 for me, but I'm French, and I've often remarked that supposedly "hard words" are just quite ordinary french words.
More comments...