English vocabulary test – how many words do you know? | Hacker News Reader

English vocabulary test – how many words do you know?

myvocab.info

24 pointsdanousna23 comments

Reading a lot of books and watching/listening to a lot of media put me quite high: CFR C2, 19 200 word families, above 78% of native speakers, above 99.9% of non-native speakers.

However. In real life I use maybe 1% of that :D Especially in in iternational settings where you eventually end up speaking a common denominator (not necessarily lowest common denominator).

I do get by writing on HN and reading books though :)

C2 seems to be easily achieved. I got 35% above native speakers and 96% above non-native speakers.

lol, yes - if you're native. I doubt the average far-eastern grandparent would achieve C2 easily.

Score of 18,900 -- often I'd have heard a word before and the process of elimination allowed me to guess it correctly. I'm guessing there's one level better CFR2?

CEFR (a standard for describing language abilities, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...) only goes up to C2.

Wish the full results were available to look over. I scored 23,300, but they only share the reliability data:

* Correctly avoided fake words (5/6)

* Answered word-meaning checks correctly (6/6)

The fake word I missed was 'ventrel', but come on, 'ventral' (with an 'a') is a word. That's just mean! Anyway, it would be fun to see (and argue about) which of the words I didn't recognize are real.

Scored 87% above native speakers with CEFR level C2 and 21100 word families. I wonder if the study found anyone at the very top of the scale?

Same score. The honesty check for 'Invidious' seemed to not provide a particularly appropriate definition option. I see it mostly used when paired with the word 'comparison' ('Invidious comparison') In the sense that it's kind of intentionally calculated to create an unfair/inaccurate comparison of some sort. 'Unfairly discriminatory' was the choice they apparently were looking for, because I see nothing was scored against me ('Answered word-meaning checks correctly (4/4)').

Unfairly discriminatory | Mostly positive | publicly accepted | Socially Neutral

Scored 65% with native speakers and 99.9% with non-native. Guess I can make myself understood. I didn’t even take the test that seriously, but there were some obscure words I’m sure no one uses anymore

Lol I use them sometimes

That's a dumb test. 9/10 english words it showed never come up in any written or spoken word. That's very stupid way to measure someone's vocabulary knowledge.

It's a test measuring outlier knowledge. By definition, most of the words will be words that never come up in common usage (and thus words of limited utility outside of reading classic literature). You shouldn't feel bad if you don't know 90% of them.

it's still stupid. proper way to measure vocabulary is to divide words into groups by usage(it's easy to analyse articles or videos from last 10 years to get real and not theoretical data), from most used to least used. you end up, for example, with 10 groups with simple words like "then" and end up with rare words, like "discombobulate". you pick 10 words from each group and ask the user about knowledge of these words. then you can build a solid overview of the user's understanding or knowledge of the vocabulary.

It'll be doing something like that. Ask you a known word. Ask you a less known word. Get more and more unlikely until it can place where your knowledge falls off.

So once it's verified that you know a couple of semi-common words it won't ask you any more common words at all.

Have you read the about page and "how it works"? https://www.myvocab.info/en/about https://www.myvocab.info/en/howitworks

It looks like a reasonable idea to me and not stupid at all.

No, when someone says something is stupid, it generally means they made a visceral judgment based on preconceptions. So, they probably DNRTFA.

Agreed. I didn't score too badly (above 50% of native speakers and above 99% of non-native). Many of the words were obscure and extremely contextual. If you are in a particular field with a lot of jargon, you may know countless words, but I don't think it means anything.

Being able to correctly define useful words would be a better test of knowledge. Just because you “know” some words doesn't mean you really understand what they mean.

Bah, it's just a test for “book smart” people to feel good about themselves. One has to feel good about that time investment, I guess.

On a side note, I don't think using too many uncommon words is a good thing. It just obscures the meaning of what you are trying to say unnecessarily. But this is a status marker and a pretty effective way to create tribal boundaries; people love to feel smart without too much effort.

Well said.

> 9/10 english words it showed never come up in any written or spoken word.

That is a dumb assertion. By definition, ALL English words come up in written word, and it's hard to imagine a case where they don't come up in spoken word as well.

Just few days ago I argued here that kinkajou is not English word and should not be in an English word game. Is bryndza English word? Both have English Wikipedia article.

"game words" in English got a bit ridiculous nowadays. While there is around 170k in usage there are over a million known and over 8k added yearly. Apparently.

Bryndza is Central European/Eastern European product, it even means "poverty" in Polish. Wikisources say it's of Romanian/Italian origin.

But if it's commonly used in a certain language, it becomes a native word.

Their results page for different languages have some interesting plots, especially when you compare languages:

- https://www.myvocab.info/pl/results-pl

- https://www.myvocab.info/en/results-en

So based on that data:

- EN has over a million known words and is growing fast, a 12 year old knows around 10k words

- PL has around 140k words in popular dictionaries, a 12 year old knows around 40k words

I wonder how much of that is sample size and grammar interpretation (definition of word) related.

That's the greatest and one of the most frustrating aspects of English as world's lingua franca: it readily absorbs any and all foreign words and makes it a part of the language.

The absolute worst part is the wildly inconsistent orthography. I have such pity for non-English learners.

Orthography changes with time in any language. French is the same; there are many weird orthographies that became the norm with various rule changes.

Language is a living thing; it is never set in stone. We just have to adapt to it; there is no other way.

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