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Comment by officemonkey | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry, this article (http://howlearnspanish.com/2010/08/how-many-words-do-you-nee...) says that for most people, 3,000 words will get you to 94% of oral communication and 10,000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers with higher education.

The difference between 10,000 and 30,000 is knowing the words "uxorcide" and "tricorn". Before this test, I've never seen the first one and the only time I've seen the second one is in reference to pirate hats.

Frankly, I'd rather have 10,000 word vocabulary in multiple languages than my current situation.

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uxorcide

"To change your software so the user experience becomes overwhelmingly worse. e.g. Some critics say Microsoft committed uxorcide with the Office Ribbon"

That's for Spanish, though, which generally uses a somewhat smaller day-to-day vocabulary since it doesn't have the same weird Romance/Germanic thing that English does.

Most languages end up having about the same information bandwidth, but make different tradeoffs between the number of syllables per second and the entropy per syllable. Spanish and Japanese, for instance, tend to be spoken rapidly and have a more regular set of sounds, but languages like English or Chinese tend to be spoken more slowly and have more different sounds in each syllable. I'd imagine that low frequency languages tend to have large vocabularies that they use, but that's just a guess.

"tricorn" is an everyday word in Spanish. The reason behind is we have a kind of police force that still wear "tricornios". And in my opinion they are still ridiculous.

Well, in many cases it helps to know multple languages. Case in point: uxoricide. There were quite a few other words I knew from other languages in the quiz (English is not my mother tongue).

That and the amount of words I know RPGs in the quiz really surprised me. How often do you use a bludgeon, wouldn't you use a bat in stead?

Finally, there's a huge difference between active vocabulary --the words you actually use in speach or writing-- and passive vocabulary that is tested here. In my humble opinion, passive vocabulary should be tested in context of a sentence.

I always thought of "bludgeon" as a verb. First I've heard it being used as a noun (and now my vocab has expanded!).

Talkative people will bludgeon you with their thoughts. It's useful when you've already used other words like "harass" and "bore" and need a synonym.

I knew “uxorcide”, but only from reading about Battlestar Galactica online.

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