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Comment by kittenfluff | Hacker News Reader

=== SPOILER ALERT! ===

The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of.

About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).

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Kinda wish you had waited until after the results were published to mention it. Plenty of people will read the comments first, so by talking about it now you're actively harming the very experiment you're so impressed by.

Unless, of course, it was assumed this discussion would take place.

[[dramatic chord]]

That only applies to people who saw this on Hacker News; the survey link is on xkcd's front page today, and I imagine there are many xkcd readers who don't come here.

And the first word in the list, hubris, refers a personality trait that the question is likely to reveal. Well played.

The order is randomized, apparently. Hubris was mid-pack for me.

At the very bottom for me.

Well, at least I don't feel so bad about not recognizing more than half of those words.

Some of them were definitely highly specific jargon to medical fields and the like. I'm betting fewer of them are made up than you think.

Are they un-googleable jargon? I googled all of them, and about half of those searches yielded bupkis. Phoropter was the only medical term I found.

I wonder if there's jargon in the intelligence services that's classified?

Certainly some jargon is typical in spoken environments but rarely necessary in written contexts, just as vice versa. Not that I have any specific proofs on the specific words in the survey, but given at least one example of curious slang ("fleek"), I wouldn't put it past Randall to attempt to find some.

Also, the fun thing about pronounceable neologisms is even if Randall made them up, there's a curious tendency in English at least to actually start using some of them.

I checked them after I'd submitted the survey. The only real words that I hadn't ticked were "regolith" (I was almost sure it was a real word, but I didn't know the meaning of it), "phoropter" (I believed it could be a piece of engineering terminology, but again didn't know the meaning) and "peristeronic" and "apricity" (I would have given better than evens that these were made up).

Mmmm... no.

* Phoropter * Tribution * Slickle * Cadine * Fination * Apricity * Revergent * Unitory * Trephony

These are not words. They are not highly specific jargon either. They are just made up nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoropter https://wordnik.com/words/apricity

Seems you're right about the rest.

I'm not sure if it has been removed from most dictionaries, but apricity is commonly accepted as "The warmth felt from sunlight". Wiktionary lists it as obsolete though.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apricity

Because guessing games are fun:

Slickle is clearly onomatopoeia for something I probably don't want to know what.

Cadine is a name (which is certainly a type of word): http://www.babycenter.com/baby-names-cadine-891835.htm

Tribution and Revergent are likely plays on con- prefix removal and substitution (contribution, convergent). If they are not part of some jargon, they will be. Similarly, the morphological construction for Unitory (-tory is the latin agency prefix) I can certainly believe it to have jargon usage.

Trephony could be a form of this noun for different grammatical situations: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trephone That would suggest to me that it may be a biosciences jargon term already.

I would argue as a descriptivist that revergent is a legit English word - something that was previously divergent that is now tending towards convergence.

"Slickle" has an entry as slang in the urban dictionary.

"Revergent" gets a definition here[1] as "a mutation that precisely restores a mutant DNA sequence to a WT DNA sequence".

[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slickle [1] http://www.flashcardmachine.com/questions-set-2.html

I thought all of the words were perfectly cromulent.

cromulent

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent

D'oh!

I thought you had intentionally misspelled it as a play on intentionally including non-words

excellent comment - I offer you my most enthusiastic contrafibularities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08

They're great words to learn for anyone wishing to embiggen their vocabulary.

Agreed ;)

I saw a Reddit post once about how Google was releasing Cromcast.

I immediately pictured a device with an HDMI interface that continuously forces your TV to change to that input, turn up the volume, and then repeatedly play short videos from different scenes, of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian, yelling "CROM!"

I thought I had an above-average vocabulary, so I was getting nervous when I didn't recognize many of them.

If he had given the final round list of words from the US National Spelling Bee, I don't think I would have even been able to tell they were real.

balletomane? zimocca? scacchite?

http://spellingbee.com/public/results/2015/round_results/spe...

Makes me feel better, then. I consider myself to have a relatively large lexicon, but only knew about 40% of the words.

Some of the words came up in urban dictionary definitions, so perhaps it was a descriptivism vs prescriptivism angle.

There’s a list of which words are real and which are fake on the wiki at http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1572:_xkcd_Survey#.... The fake words aren’t even in the Oxford English Dictionary – I checked.

I don't know why, but I was able to recognize the non-words instantly (with one exception) even though I didn't know the meaning of every single "real" one. (Peristeronic, etc.)

Perhaps a remnant of my spelling-bee days.

I knew "Peristeronic" was a real word, because I'd seen it somewhere before. Turns out it was another xkcd: https://xkcd.com/798/

As a non-native speaker, this was a hard question to be honest on. I recognize the word "rife", I can use it in a sentence, but _do I know what it means_?

I can't remember what I clicked.

I wondered the same (also a non-native speaker), but I figured if I can use the word correctly (to my knowledge) in a sentence, it means I know what it means. Even if I can't succinctly describe its meaning in English or Dutch. That's a job for dictionary-editors :-)

The problem with "rife" is that it's mainly used in the context of "rife with", where it means something like "full of". Then it gets confusing because it's not really correct to say "rife" means "full". Or, "rife means full changing with to of", which is just word salad.

And not at all biased toward native english speakers...

Or people with access to a computer and the internet.

He addressed that in the heading text: "This is obviously not going to be a real random sample of people"

"Biased" in the sense of correlation, yes.

Really? I thought it was biased toward native USAian speakers. What the fuck is Cilantro?

Technically that's a bias toward Spanish speakers too, since cilantro is just "coriander" in Spanish, usually referring to the leaves.

Technically examples are biased to the specific examples given though they aren't supposed to serve the particular examples in particular.

Coriander leaves.

Does this not have its own word in British English? Even given their international cuisine?

We generally just call it coriander.

It was funny to see the slang word "fleek" in there, very unexpected.

I put yes for this because I've heard the funny sounding slang phrase 'on fleek' (similar to on point) before, but I'm not sure if it actually is an OED word.

What are a couple of different ways you would use "fleek" in a sentence? Only, I want to start using it but don't want to sound like a fool.

You must accept that you will sound like a fool just for using this word. You can use it for anything you want to show satisfaction/approval for. React.js on fleek, eyebrows on fleek, uptime on fleek

"Eyebrows on fleek" is definitely most popular, but "uptime on fleek" is now one of my favorite phrases and will be used liberally.

It isn't in the OED yet (I just checked)

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