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Comment by alberto-m | Hacker News Reader

I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.

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"Defenestrate" was not in my list, but it's a word I would have gotten, as I know it from: (1) An A.C. Clarke short story ("The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch", in "Tales from the White Hart", if I remember correctly); and (2) The Defenstration of Prague (I have visited Prague Castle - there were apparently multiple defenestrations there). It's an interestingly (amusingly?) macabre word. (It also helps that I know high-school French and German plus understand Swedish as being very close to Norwegian.)

Prague defenestration is a high school history concept that is self promoting due to the combination of "funny word" and macabre.

If there wasnt this fancy word for that, used in tests and quizzes it would be a footnote in history.

When another person dies in Russia by being thrown from the window, nobody calls it defenestration. We just call it a tuesday.

Totally. After studying few hundred words of Spanish, German and French I thought hmm maybe a way to level up English is to learn basics of other languages. For example Fenster is Window in German. Defenestration becomes easy guess.

Interesting. I didn’t have defenestrate in mine - I’d assumed they used the same word list.

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