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Comment by Laurel1234 | Hacker News Reader

Pretty fun.

I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow.

Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.

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It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The distractor answers weren't convincing enough. For starters, when an answer was based on deconstructing the word into common English words, that ruled it out. After all, if it was, then it wouldn't have been obscure.

A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard. From the exams I know (excluding those whose nature precludes it, such as based on calculation or rote memorization) the only that does this brutally well is LEK (Polish medical graduate exam). It's nigh impossible to vibe guess it at more than random chance for someone outside the field.

What I also noticed: when there are two contradictory definitions to choose from, it is usually one of those two.

For all its shortcomings, this was part of the fun, deducing the likely correct answer when you see a word for the first time.

Yeah I also got exactly 74k. Stuff like “xylologist” I guessed had to do with vegetation because of “xylem”, whereas xylophone player was too on the nose. Then again, maybe knowing xylem in the first place makes 74k reasonable.

Yeah I guessed that one right because xylophone player sounded like a trap.

I don't understand how they rank words though, some extremely common words like xenophobia were ranked as high as much more obscure ones.

Haha. Yeah I figured Xylo- (wood) + sth. related to mono-poly so wood-seller made sense. Never have heard of this word before

I think the test was vibe coded, because a xylologist is someone who studies wood, not someone who sells wood. I am not sure if "xylolgist" was the exact word, though.

xylo- = wood; -logy = study

Indeed from M-W: "a branch of dendrology dealing with the gross and the minute structure of wood"

Seems to be a hapax legomenon https://www.oed.com/dictionary/xylopolist_n "OED's only evidence for xylopolist is from 1656, in the writing of Thomas Blount, antiquary and lexicographer."

That test had several hapax legomena on it, so it would make sense.

66k for me, but I didn't get that word, instead I got ones like Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Flibbertigibbet, and Brobdingnagian... which the latter two interestingly do show up in my keyboard's word completion suggestions.

I've encountered flibbertigibbet and Brobdingnagian. Never encountered hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia before, at least I don't remember encountering it.

Flibbertigibbet appears in some of the Little House on the Prairie (Laura and Mary) books, if I remember right.

And I've also read Gulliver's Travels which is where Brobdingnagian comes from. Brobdingnag was a land of giants. Pretty sure I've seen the word used elsewhere though.

I knew Flibbertigibbet from the sound of music:

MARGARETTA: How do you find a word that means Maria?

BERTHE: A flibberti gibbet!

SOPHIA: A willo' the wisp!

MARGARETTA: A clown!

in casual use you might also be able to guess it from context, so i think it’s a wash

> A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard.

In case of online quiz you can have a "competition" between distractors:

1. start by having much more distractors than needed and pick randomly

2. for each measure the probability of it getting clicked (clicks/times it's shown)

3. show the most frequently clicked distractors more often

Yeah, as I researched the topic of multiple choice exam design, seems the rule of thumb is to reject outright any distractors that are chosen by less than 5% of test takers.

It would have been nice to have an “i don’t know” button. Instead I decided to select the first option for words I didn’t know instead of trying to figure them out. Although when I got to the final group I couldn’t resist trying to figure them out. It estimated 61k for me.

Indeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!

It'd also be a lot less awkward to go through 100 words if it had keyboard shortcuts (1-4 for the words, enter to submit) and if they fixed the layout shift jank

wouldn't even let me tab to sumbit, you had to click, tab through each following option, then to submit, but then you had to tab again to confirm the submission!

Another suggestion: update an estimate of words known after every word. E.g. start out with a range of 0 to 170,000. Then after the first word, show 100 to 170,000. Etc.

Users get drops of information and can stop whenever they feel. I stopped well before 100.

> I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so.

Having an answer counted as incorrect, just because I've accidentally touched the screen of the phone? I would absolutely hate that.

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