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Comment by natural219 | Hacker News Reader

19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even my age group, let alone the general populace (I'm 20).

That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm not familiar with. Most of the ones I missed are words I recognize from this series, although since I'm not 100% sure of them, so I left them unchecked.

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I don't think this is very accurate. I scored 95+% on both SAT and GRE verbal, and I only got a 27,400. I imagine there are quite a few test takers who are not completely honest with themselves.

Don't be upset, I got 19,700.

Using big words make a good communicator not. The point of using a language is to communicate. Using esoteric words only a fraction of the population knows defeats this purpose.

If anything, given the same amount of practice but with a smaller vocabulary will make you a better communicator, IMHO.

I must admit, as an American male, a little older than you, my score was also so low, I'm too embarrassed to even mention. All those years of cheating on vocabulary tests (merely by memorizing the words 5 minutes prior to taking the test) in high school did not help. It's one of the those things I look back on in life and regret. Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to catch up ?

edit: forgot to mention, while I am a native English speaker, both my parents tend to speak Polish most of the time, while I always reply in English. I have to wonder how much this had an affect on me.

Read a lot. In fact, buy a Kindle and read a lot. It has a built-in dictionary which is quite decent, and you'll actually look up words that you would otherwise skim past with a mediocre context-based understanding.

Howdy,

I scored a little over 40k on this, and did well on other verbal tests for the general population when I was still taking tests.

I attribute much of my facility to 1)reading fantasy and 2)looking up words I don't know. Since I loathe interrupting the flow of a story, I read with a pencil and make a list of words to batch learning later.

Best,

I filled pages of word lists while reading Cryptonomicon. It was amazing.

22,300 as an American 22 year-old. I write and read slightly moreso than most people too (though nothing too formal or high-academia).

I also thought I had an unfair advantage early on because I knew a lot of words from playing Blizzard games all my life. Sorely disappointed :(.

20.7K myself and I'm 24 from the UK. I think the test is a little harsh or doesn't really mean what people would think. On the second group of words, half of those words aren't in popular use any more -- it's almost like a lesson in history.

I was a bit disappointed with 23,700, but it appears to be good for a non-native speaker. My wife, a native English speaker, virtually lapped me at 42,600 words. :)

Perhaps the results of this test don't predict academic success very well. I graduated at the top of my program (of about 30 graduates) last year and scored only 20.5k.

Maybe I fell behind my peers by only reading comp sci, math, business, and communications related stuff for 4 years. Guess I've got some catching up to do.

I'm 22 came in at 19.5k. I guess I need to use the dictionary in my Kindle a lot more.

I'm 23, I took this thing half awake and came in at 24k. I'm not an avid reader. The test seems to pull random words from a dictionary and not words used in a general mannor. Not only that but it messed all the delicious skill-trade grammar I know and love.

Bollocks.

Would you have checked the word "manner"?

Or "manor"?

or "messed"?

This makes me feel a lot better about my 15500 as someone from Holland who has been studying in England for 4 months.

GRRM tends to use a bunch of unusual words pretty frequently: "dandle", "garron", "palfrey", "hauberk", "solar".

I thought in aDwD that "leal" was just yet another Kindle OCR mess-up for "loyal" until I found out it actually really is a word - an old English word for "loyal"! Goes to show... something, I guess! :)

That's why I really like reading with the Kindle app. The dictionary is only a tap away. I'm now in the habit of looking up every word I don't know.

Also, leal means loyal in spanish, that's how I knew, when I was reading that book :)

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