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Posted by abnry 6 days ago

How many of the 170k English words do you know?(vocabowl-870366514258.us-west1.run.app)
501 points | 554 commentspage 2
dbingham 5 days ago|
If the goal is to actually calculate how many words we know, then you should include an "I don't know" option. Sure, some people will choose to guess to inflate their score, but some of us will be honest because we legitimately want to know our scores.

If you force me to guess, then I'm going to guess. Not only does that give me a 25% chance of getting it right at random, but as others have pointed out, it is very hard to make a multiple choice question that isn't guessable by an astute enough test taker. I think I knew 80 - 85 of those words, but I scored 97, because those questions were very guessable.

Also, reiterating everyone else's comments with respect to the UX needing fewer clicks, and also the definitions not being exact or precise in many cases.

fritzo 5 days ago||
Feature request: fewer clicks. It should be one click per question
TheJoeMan 5 days ago||
I'd suggest a "toast" would suffice for the correct answers. Proceed to the next question when correct, with a "next" button when incorrect.
ortusdux 5 days ago|||
Keyboard shortcuts would be nice as well. When I saw it was 100 questions I bailed.
em-bee 5 days ago|||
another feature request: add a skip or "don't know" option. if i truly don't know a word then a lucky guess would inflate my score.
goodpoint 5 days ago||
It should be zero clicks
JauntyHatAngle 5 days ago||
That was fun. Bit confused by the result because it says I was "wow are you stephen fry?" Which I assume meant I did decent. (72K).

But then below it said "you are a man of few words".

I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.

sowbug 5 days ago||
Maybe "few words" means your larger vocabulary lets you use a single word to represent a concept that someone else would need several words to say. But the conversation ends up longer when the other person asks you to define the obscure word you just used.
Joe_Cool 5 days ago|||
Combined with the factoid it features under "how is this calculated":

    However, most native speakers have an active vocabulary between 15,000 and 35,000 words.
We must be geniuses, lol.
welshwelsh 5 days ago|||
That tracks. Active vocabulary means the set of words that someone knows well enough to actually use in their speech or writing.

That's always going to be smaller than the set of words for which a person can choose the correct definition out of four options.

kccqzy 5 days ago||||
There are words that I know from this quiz that I would never use in real life or in my writings. I’m not sure why. That’s the active vocabulary distinction.
marcyb5st 5 days ago||||
For sure there is a bit of selection bias with hackernews users. Not saying we are all geniuses, but I strongly believe we are, at least, more educated than your average Joe
ricardobayes 5 days ago|||
You are almost always going to find people with above average reading and writing skills on an online forum - especially one with such "curated" audience and spartan UI.
gib444 5 days ago||
> stephen fry

"May I compartmentalise? I hate to, but may I? may I?"

"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers"

"...saying the same weary things time after weary time: I love you. Don't go in there. Get out. You have no right to say that. Stop that. Why should I. That hurt. Help. Marjorie is dead"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg (fantastic sketch!)

GolDDranks 5 days ago||
I think it was way too easy to guess corretly based on exluding obviously incorrect choises and then going with vibes.

There were many words I couldn't have explain the meaning of at all, if I wouldn't have had the options, but having the options made it easy. I wouldn't count those correct answers as a part of my vocabulary (even passive), even if I could answer with relative confidence.

kogus 5 days ago||
Suggestion: Add an "I don't know" button. If I don't know a word, I can admit it - but if I have to guess, then I have a 1/4 chance of getting incorrect credit.
sigmoid10 5 days ago|
The chances are actually often way better than 1/4. For the words I didn't know, I was almost always able to exclude one or two options. Sometimes even three, finding the solution by exclusion.
alberto-m 5 days ago||
I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.
Per_Bothner 5 days ago||
"Defenestrate" was not in my list, but it's a word I would have gotten, as I know it from: (1) An A.C. Clarke short story ("The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch", in "Tales from the White Hart", if I remember correctly); and (2) The Defenstration of Prague (I have visited Prague Castle - there were apparently multiple defenestrations there). It's an interestingly (amusingly?) macabre word. (It also helps that I know high-school French and German plus understand Swedish as being very close to Norwegian.)
rvba 5 days ago||
Prague defenestration is a high school history concept that is self promoting due to the combination of "funny word" and macabre.

If there wasnt this fancy word for that, used in tests and quizzes it would be a footnote in history.

When another person dies in Russia by being thrown from the window, nobody calls it defenestration. We just call it a tuesday.

pratikdeoghare 5 days ago|||
Totally. After studying few hundred words of Spanish, German and French I thought hmm maybe a way to level up English is to learn basics of other languages. For example Fenster is Window in German. Defenestration becomes easy guess.
avazhi 5 days ago||
Interesting. I didn’t have defenestrate in mine - I’d assumed they used the same word list.
teo_zero 5 days ago||
Reading through the comments, I've noticed you can tell the native speakers by their scores in the word categories. A native speaker will score 20/20 in the first two bands and progressively less in the following ones. For those who have learned English as a foreign language, the scores are more evenly distributed.

So it's not uncommon to see a native English speaker totaling 90 as 20,20,19,17,14, and a foreigner reaching the same total as 18,18,18,18,18. Strangely enough, the algorithm favors the latter, because it assigns more weight to the higher-end bands.

Is this of any use? I doubt so, but it was fun.

P.S. of course a more reliable clue of nativeness is the use of "its" and "it's" interchangeably, a mistake EFL learners wouldn't do.

lekevicius 5 days ago||
I'm not a native speaker (Eastern Europe), and my scores are 20, 20, 17, 18, 15 - more aligned to your native speaker model.
teo_zero 5 days ago||
Oops! I had better revise my theory, then!
oarla 5 days ago||
Not a native speaker and my scores are 20, 19, 19, 20 and 15 for a total of 93.

Maybe I should consider myself as one :)

teo_zero 5 days ago||
> Maybe I should consider myself as one

It depends: do you get its and it's right? :)

kiaofz 5 days ago||
These should maybe be checked through. Many are the second or third definitions, and some even reference the word in the definition e.g Lethargic: exhibiting lethargy
spudlyo 5 days ago||
"It's a dead language!" they said, "It's a waste of time!" they said, "It's not like you can talk to dead Romans." they said. WHO IS LAUGHING NOW!?
snovymgodym 5 days ago||
Learning Latin vocabulary is pretty useful. Latin grammar, not so much.
spudlyo 4 days ago||
The fun way to learn vocabulary is through extensive reading. Without learning something about grammar, you're stuck learning vocabulary through Anki decks, which is not my idea of a good time.
dalanmiller 5 days ago||
Underappreciated comment
riwsky 5 days ago|
A much better test, which dynamically adjusts difficulty level: https://www.myvocab.info/en
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