This was fun! And it told me I know 55k words which made me a little happy.

I'm not sure exactly how you did this, but I think you asked an LLM to come up with the wrong options. Two things to consider:

1. While the LLM can go r good options, they won't be always hard to guess. I wonder if instead you can have the LLM generate very close words (or skip using an LLM entirely) and put those as the options. 2. If you will generate options with an LLM, make sure you are mindful of its inability to shuffle things around. The correct answer was overwhelmingly the first or second option in the list. You should ask the model to give the options in a uniform order (say from true meaning then decreasing amount of replayability), then manually shuffle them so that the probability of which option (A, B, C or D) is always 25%.

67900

English is not my native language. I get my vocabulary from browsing the Internet. There is no way I know that many words.

Usually the longest answer is the correct one.

Also sometimes two options are the opposites of each others. In this case, one of them is correct.

I feel like you can get close to 70/100 with this heuristics, without actually knowing any words.

They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha.

Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other.

This is why when people tell me I'm wrong, so often I feel smarter than they are. HN quizzes are conditioning me for some antisocial attitudes, I think.

"77,250words "Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

I do concur that a refined collection of incorrect proposed responses which includes selections among terms with semantic proximity, conflated synonyms and plausible morphology could refine the accuracy of evaluations; and if the test was intended to bestow authentic assessments of lexicographical capability this would in all probability become an efficacious approach, but as a simply presentable quiz for folks with sesquipedalian proclivities I was not unduly discomfited by anything moreso than the extraneous clicks leading to and following the display of dichotomous determinations.

Once you get to the Advanced/Expert words onwards it's too easy to guess the correct answer: it's usually the longest option. And once you notice this pattern it's impossible to try to guess fairly.

Not a very good test. Too easy to guess many of the words, and the words seem to follow a theme. For example my list had five or six that had to do with speaking too much or too little (verbose, lugubrious, and a few others in that vein). And many easy words were placed late in the test (e.g. zeitgeist, facetious being in the expert and grand master categories?).

And it didn't even tell me at the end how many words I know!

There is a similar variant of such a test where you just go down a list of words of increasing obscurity, ticking the ones you are familiar with. If you do this once or twice, you can get a fairly good estimate of the actual number of words you know.

When there are two options that describe exactly the opposite of each other, it will be one of them. Reduced a bit the fun - but then again, for some words I understood what they are dealing with, but not whether positively or negatively.

UX suggestion to make going thought this much faster:

1. Frame each option with one key (1,2,3,4). User press 2, select the second option

2. Let the user change options if they want until they press Enter. Enter submits the answer.

3. Once submitted, another Enter brings the next one

78,500.

The very first one was "Unique". I wondered if "the only one of its kind" was still the correct answer, having seen "very unique" used all too often recently. They accept "only one of its kind".

Missed "hegemony" (wasn't sure a hegemony had a leader), "quotidian" (should have known that, seen it before), "ultracrepedarian" (new word to me), "absquatulate" (19th century slang), and "fartlek" (Swedish interval training).