there's also https://www.myvocab.info/en

From what I can tell they actually have a bit more robust science behind their algorithm (and a lot less questions to answer)

English is my third language. My vocabulary has been stuck at an "OK" level because I struggle to actually retain and understand new words.

I built https://segue.app to solve this. It uses illustrations (pictures) and etymology to help with deep understanding and long-term retention so words actually stick. Yeah, it is all AI generated.

>Required Reading

>Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.

I actually have! I was very bored with the barely-above-"see spot run" books in the classroom at around 8, and we didn't yet have open access to the school library. The dictionary was a better option than all the others I had access to (in class).

Any other dictionary-completionists in here? Regardless of size - I'm fairly sure mine was rather small, though not a pocket-sized one.

The words clearly are not random. I don't know how the author chose the word bank, but it's not a representative sample. It's all fairly common words and then intentionally silly words that are very long (Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia), that wouldn't really appear from a random sample as frequently as they do. I tested myself from my own Webster's collegiate dictionary some years ago with actually random words and the results were way off compared to this.

Stuck it out to the end against my better judgement. Got 89/100 due to difficulties at the "Grandmaster" stage (12/20).

I thought it was going to be tougher because the very first word on my run was "Yield" and none of the options seemed convincing to me. I went with something that was at least fairly adjacent to the "something produced by" (as opposed to "submit to") meaning and this did successfully yield (he he) my first point.

I got 88 out of 100, but all I learned from that is that I am really good at guessing. For something like 20 of the words I was able to guess by eliminating the options that sounded unlikely and in a few cases just guess from the meaning of parts of the word.

I'd prefer an "I don't know" option just for a more honest assessment of how many words I truly know versus how many words I can guess.

This is rather like SAT from 35 years ago.

Same strategies apply for guessing the unknown especially with a modicum(it was on the test!) of Latin knowledge..

Strange that pretty every one here is getting 70k estimates (93/100 for me).

Feels a bit high at least for me as a non-native speaker.

I got 2 words I knew wrong, and guessed about 5 unknown words correctly. Those were bizarre repetitive words I've never seen before.

I remember doing a similar test from a reputable university about 10-15 years ago also in an app format and only got about 30k estimate.

I think native speakers of Latin derived languages have an advantage given the proposed words in my run. The list was overly biased that way. In fact, many of the advance and grandmaster levels words are basically that. Latin derived words.

At least that was my experience as a native Italian speaker. My English vocabulary is good, but not great by any means and by reading books in English I know that there are plenty of words that are not derived from Latin

This app is a great example of what AI does to your brain. No one making their own choices in the app design would make each question need three clicks.

There is a typo in "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," it should be "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia" instead. (Also, it breaks the layout.)