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Comment by gethly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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