As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied.

Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious word) was characterized as intermediate but I think it's much more obscure and less obvious than that; Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was used as a word (I got that wrong as well) - any type of 'phobia' word is really the sort of thing a fourth grader opens up a page in the dictionary and points out, not a word that is used... ever; metamorphosis and kinetic were labeled expert, which I don't agree with (what elementary schooler doesn't learn about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly? what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy?).

Most words were reasonably well defined in a way that most people would understand or recognize. A few words had poor definitions: lethargy ("the state of being lethargic" - obvious); complacent ("smug satisfaction with oneself" - I disagree that complacency is intrinsically smug); magnanimous ("generous toward a rival" - I disagree that a rival must be involved); gauche ("socially awkward" - this is sort of close but the given definition completely misses the idea of being tactless).

They call it scientific and give a hand-wavey formula, but they don't explain how words are stratified in the first place. If stratified sampling is a formally recognized method of doing this, it would be nice to have a link to a real reference. I think I know a lot of words, but I am skeptical of the estimate this app provided (north of 75k).

Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored.

I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust score at the beginning, then things settle down.

In practice this means you get a sequence of increasingly uncommon words initially, until you get one wrong, then you drop back to something easier until you start getting things right again, and eventually circle around words at your level.

Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick (or add an undo button).

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error.

(context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score)

I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words?

Their "How is this calculated" page that appears at the end explains their error:

> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.

> We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:

> 1. Core Basics ~3,000 words > 2. Intermediate ~7,000 words > 3. Advanced ~10,000 words > 4. Expert ~25,000 words > 5. The Obscure ~40,000+ words

> If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band.

> Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)

Their strata add up to 85000, not ~170k, making a perfect score still give a 50%.

They're also using a pretty limited and perhaps non-difficulty-representative subset of the language.

Cute, but wrong on many counts.

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.

I think it was way too easy to guess corretly based on exluding obviously incorrect choises and then going with vibes.

There were many words I couldn't have explain the meaning of at all, if I wouldn't have had the options, but having the options made it easy. I wouldn't count those correct answers as a part of my vocabulary (even passive), even if I could answer with relative confidence.

It should be possible to respond "I don't know". When you really-really don't know, it's unfair to get a 1/4 chance at right anyway, or even better if you use routine multiple-choice tactics.

I got credit for a few that I would have happily just missed.

It is quite easy to cheese the problems: many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back"), many problem have this "correct answer + opposite meaning + 2 unrelated things" answer structure, and for the second half of the answers, very often the longest answer is the correct one. The wrong options are not well designed here.

The sample of words is also heavily biased towards concepts relating to words, speech, speakers, and/or persuation. They are likely generated by an LLM which is primed on the task of choosing words, and end up choosing words related to "words".

For context, I'm an L2 speaker, linguistic nerd, and I use English mostly in academic/professional settings. I got 75,400 by a combination of the tactics above; in reality it might be closer to 10-15k.

The design is also painfully similar to Duolingo if anyone can spot that.

It seems like the right answer is usually the longest of the choices, I managed to get a few just by picking the longest. It would also be nice if there was a "I don't know" instead of guessing and skewing the results by getting it right, though maybe thats accounted for

I have a copy of the shorter Oxford English Dictionary from 1970 which I inherited. It is two massive volumes and is only shorter in comparison to the full dictionary which is 12 volumes (more in more modern editions).

My shorter OED contains 163,000 words (compared to the 600,000 words of the longer).

According to this site I know 71,000 words... Let's test that against the OED. I should have about 43% chance if knowing a word picked at random.

In my totally scientific test (ha) I chose 50 words at random from the OED and discovered I knew 29 of them for a score of 58% which is more than two sigma from 43%, this disproving the hypothesis.

I forgot what that was now, but it was a fun experiment.

At first I noticed that for many questions two or three of the answers are obviously wrong. So in many cases the correct answer can be guesses easily. But then I noticed that in 90% of the cases the correct answer is the longest of the four. This makes guessing even easier. The whole thing has a vibe-slopped feel to it.

Got 59,800, Performance Breakdown:

Core Basics 19/20

Intermediate 17/20

Advanced 19/20

Expert 14/20

Grandmaster 12/20

I guess, it's not too bad for a non-native speaker.

Minor feedback:

1. The correct answer for "Lethargic" is "Affected by lethargy". I think, definitions should not use words that share common root with the defined word, because:

a. it makes guessing too easy

b. it basically becomes a circular definition which is meaningless

2. Options almost always include 1 correct answer, 1 direct opposite and 2 completely random. Once you learn to recognise it, you can easily rule out 2 random options and have a 50/50 guess.

Not that I want to cheat in such a game, but for many words everything but correct definition is shorter or follow some "dumb rpg text" template.

Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.

Like for me most of more complex words been adjectives with few nouns. And in many cases you can just see 2/4 or 3/4 definitions are not for adjective.

Interesting choice of words I'd say: as a French person this test is pretty much a test about “how close is the English word to the original French meaning” as the test was almost devoid of obscure words of Germanic origin.

At least I learned a bunch of «faux-amis» in the process.

A common pattern is the word's true definition and its opposite, plus two mostly unrelated meanings. So, when in doubt, you can improve your changes by picking one of the opposing pair. That's a bit of short-coming.

If the goal is to actually calculate how many words we know, then you should include an "I don't know" option. Sure, some people will choose to guess to inflate their score, but some of us will be honest because we legitimately want to know our scores.

If you force me to guess, then I'm going to guess. Not only does that give me a 25% chance of getting it right at random, but as others have pointed out, it is very hard to make a multiple choice question that isn't guessable by an astute enough test taker. I think I knew 80 - 85 of those words, but I scored 97, because those questions were very guessable.

Also, reiterating everyone else's comments with respect to the UX needing fewer clicks, and also the definitions not being exact or precise in many cases.

Feature request: fewer clicks. It should be one click per question

Longest definition and semi-columns are strong biases for right answer. Also, my run contained a lot of adjectives for which it is pretty obvious that noun definitions do not match.

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.

Suggestion: Add an "I don't know" button. If I don't know a word, I can admit it - but if I have to guess, then I have a 1/4 chance of getting incorrect credit.

That was fun. Bit confused by the result because it says I was "wow are you stephen fry?" Which I assume meant I did decent. (72K).

But then below it said "you are a man of few words".

I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.

Reading through the comments, I've noticed you can tell the native speakers by their scores in the word categories. A native speaker will score 20/20 in the first two bands and progressively less in the following ones. For those who have learned English as a foreign language, the scores are more evenly distributed.

So it's not uncommon to see a native English speaker totaling 90 as 20,20,19,17,14, and a foreigner reaching the same total as 18,18,18,18,18. Strangely enough, the algorithm favors the latter, because it assigns more weight to the higher-end bands.

Is this of any use? I doubt so, but it was fun.

P.S. of course a more reliable clue of nativeness is the use of "its" and "it's" interchangeably, a mistake EFL learners wouldn't do.

"It's a dead language!" they said, "It's a waste of time!" they said, "It's not like you can talk to dead Romans." they said. WHO IS LAUGHING NOW!?

I could actually get almost all of the last third correctly by choosing the option that's the longest, has a semicolon, or a coma.

Aside from that, I didn't like that most of the words only had one or at most two definitions that sounded viable.

A lot of these words have either Latin or Greek origins, for most questions you can deduce the correct answer by asking the question: "Which of these would make sense to develop into a separate word through the mostly non-modern history of the language?".

I would enjoy it way more if all four options sounded equally viable, and I couldn't deduce the correct answer without actually being sure about the meaning of the word. I understand that coming up with choices like that for each question is way harder if you actually validate all of them manually.

I got a score of 76000 best estimate with 85 being correct, even though English is not my native language and I'm not that good at it.

A much better test, which dynamically adjusts difficulty level: https://www.myvocab.info/en

An alternative algorithm which would probably converge faster than 100 questions would be something like Elo or Glicko 2.

A word's "difficulty" would be some function of how rare it is. Once you have a reasonable estimate of the user's "skill" you can infer that a user won't know more difficult words. The benefit of this is you're not spending time asking the user about words they probably know.

Of course it's possible at an individual level, difficulty does not monotonically increase as a function of how rare the word is. A person might be very familiar with a domain-specific subset of English. But the "stratified sampling" approach will also have this problem.

There is a similar problem in chess, where players have ratings which really only change on one dimension. So there can theoretically be a mismatch when puzzles are also scored on a single axis, since a "harder" puzzle that contains a motif a player is familiar with will actually be easier for the player.

Did the first 25, got all correct, got bored.

It needs some kind of auto adjusting difficulty...

These should maybe be checked through. Many are the second or third definitions, and some even reference the word in the definition e.g Lethargic: exhibiting lethargy

78,500.

The very first one was "Unique". I wondered if "the only one of its kind" was still the correct answer, having seen "very unique" used all too often recently. They accept "only one of its kind".

Missed "hegemony" (wasn't sure a hegemony had a leader), "quotidian" (should have known that, seen it before), "ultracrepedarian" (new word to me), "absquatulate" (19th century slang), and "fartlek" (Swedish interval training).

Fascinating how many of the words I didn't know, but got correct from how they sound in my head which makes be believe this test is flawed.

English being my language of choice, but not my first language, I got 75/100. Performance breakdown: 18/20, 18/20, 11/20, 18/20, 10/20.

(My first language is Russian.)

This app is a great example of what AI does to your brain. No one making their own choices in the app design would make each question need three clicks.

Would other people define "complacent" as "Smug satisfaction with oneself"? I'm not so sure.

Regardless, this was fun.

With the risk of giving a spoiler, it seems the correct answer is almost always the longer, more elaborate one.

I would guess this causes an up shift in results even if not consciously noticed.

Nice! Some feedback: The score it shows doesn't really mean anything to me. I think it would be more interesting for the user to know how they rank (perhaps in percentile terms) relative to the overall english-speaking population and/or relative to other users on the site

I'm sure everyones scores would be a lot lower if we had to describe each word instead of selecting between silly/smart sounding definitions. As was mentioned before, it needs "I don't know" button, otherwise it's too easy to guess.

This approach could also work for getting more accurate results:

1. Show word without any definitions

2. User clicks "I know" or "I don't know"

3. If user clicked "I know", show actual definition of word

4. User selects "I was correct" or "I was not correct"

>Required Reading

>Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.

I actually have! I was very bored with the barely-above-"see spot run" books in the classroom at around 8, and we didn't yet have open access to the school library. The dictionary was a better option than all the others I had access to (in class).

Any other dictionary-completionists in here? Regardless of size - I'm fairly sure mine was rather small, though not a pocket-sized one.

I did it and achieved 69’400. English is a second language to me and I think this is quite overestimated, though. Mostly due to French being my first language and most of the advanced words in the tests were derived from French. Or some more academic use.

Far too slow to complete and too many clicks. I'm surprised it's not using a binary search method easy-hard-easy ... Then it could show an in progress metric.

I think native speakers of Latin derived languages have an advantage given the proposed words in my run. The list was overly biased that way. In fact, many of the advance and grandmaster levels words are basically that. Latin derived words.

At least that was my experience as a native Italian speaker. My English vocabulary is good, but not great by any means and by reading books in English I know that there are plenty of words that are not derived from Latin

Once you get to the Advanced/Expert words onwards it's too easy to guess the correct answer: it's usually the longest option. And once you notice this pattern it's impossible to try to guess fairly.

It's hilarious that most of these words are French

Only scored 93... One of those, "yclept" I've never ever encountered before (as a native Australian English speaker) and only lucked out by way of elimination.

Interesting that this showed up here now. I did it a week ago after hearing about it on The Rest Is Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw

Good thing I read this post this morning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48603664

What I read long ago in a book on English:

TV vocabulary is targeted at 6th grade reading level.

Conversational English is about 2,000 words.

High school vocabulary is about 10,000 words.

College degree vocabulary is about 30,000 words

English has over a million words.

Which heartens me, because it means I can be "fluent" in another language by learning just 2,000 words.

there's also https://www.myvocab.info/en

From what I can tell they actually have a bit more robust science behind their algorithm (and a lot less questions to answer)

I have recently worked on the same kind of similar quiz for German.

However I have some other ideas and my quiz isn't "science based"

- in my quiz there are only "yes / no answers" This way you don't spend eternity reading descriptions of the word "apple". It also means I can estimate separately my passive and active vocabulary.

The OP missing "I don't know button" which will overestimate any result by 25% percent.

- I'm adjusting dynamically how many questions to ask in each bucket.

the goal of my quiz is to estimate a number of German words an English speaking learner has learned.

So I have curated vocabulary to remove "free words" like rare compounds of common words and other rare words which satisfy "any European knows this word without learning".

The final vocabulary used in a quiz is approx 8k words only

https://wortschi.de/quiz

I got 68,900 words, with the vast majority of the errors being on the grandmaster level.

As a non-native English speaker, I found that result pretty good! Though being a native Portuguese speaker certainly helped me as many difficult words in English borrow from Latin, and in Portuguese the Latin influence is more pronounced.

This is rather like SAT from 35 years ago.

Same strategies apply for guessing the unknown especially with a modicum(it was on the test!) of Latin knowledge..

Strange that pretty every one here is getting 70k estimates (93/100 for me).

Feels a bit high at least for me as a non-native speaker.

I got 2 words I knew wrong, and guessed about 5 unknown words correctly. Those were bizarre repetitive words I've never seen before.

I remember doing a similar test from a reputable university about 10-15 years ago also in an app format and only got about 30k estimate.

I think that this needs an application of Bayes Rule against the ¼ chance I guessed and got it right by luck.

Gave it a try and got 78 correct out of 100, so it extrapolated it to me knowing about 55k+ words and saying most native speakers only get 15k - 35k...Interesting

There is a typo in "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia," it should be "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia" instead. (Also, it breaks the layout.)

Very easy for French speakers ahah

Presumably it's a random batch of words since you can run the test again. I wonder how much the word selection affects the outcome. I got 66,750 with 20/20/15/17/14.

I'm curious how the difficult is chosen because "obfuscate" was included in the hardest difficulty but I would not consider that to me a difficult word.

Also I found that some of the definitions were not completely correct.

87/100 64,250

A lot of words used in Software Engineering as metaphors helped.

Also one weird tip. If I didn't know the answer went for the negative description of human behaviour answer and I guess 50% chance rather than 1 in 4.

Stuck it out to the end against my better judgement. Got 89/100 due to difficulties at the "Grandmaster" stage (12/20).

I thought it was going to be tougher because the very first word on my run was "Yield" and none of the options seemed convincing to me. I went with something that was at least fairly adjacent to the "something produced by" (as opposed to "submit to") meaning and this did successfully yield (he he) my first point.

Yarborough is _also_ an English town so I should have got one more

69,250 (91/100) - I think being French helped a lot for the most complex words, as they're basically the same!

I flubbed a couple advanced/master and half of grandmaster, eh good enough.

Be fun to start at Master and up, but is kerfuffle really grandmaster?

Gaikwar and Kowtow are English words?

The longest answer choice is correct 80%+ of the time, when it should be closer to 25%. I was able to breeze through unfamiliar words just by picking the longest option every time…

This was fun! And it told me I know 55k words which made me a little happy.

I'm not sure exactly how you did this, but I think you asked an LLM to come up with the wrong options. Two things to consider:

1. While the LLM can go r good options, they won't be always hard to guess. I wonder if instead you can have the LLM generate very close words (or skip using an LLM entirely) and put those as the options. 2. If you will generate options with an LLM, make sure you are mindful of its inability to shuffle things around. The correct answer was overwhelmingly the first or second option in the list. You should ask the model to give the options in a uniform order (say from true meaning then decreasing amount of replayability), then manually shuffle them so that the probability of which option (A, B, C or D) is always 25%.

I got 84/100 right. Their "Scientific Estimate" was that I know 65,300 words.

66k

"77,250words "Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

I do concur that a refined collection of incorrect proposed responses which includes selections among terms with semantic proximity, conflated synonyms and plausible morphology could refine the accuracy of evaluations; and if the test was intended to bestow authentic assessments of lexicographical capability this would in all probability become an efficacious approach, but as a simply presentable quiz for folks with sesquipedalian proclivities I was not unduly discomfited by anything moreso than the extraneous clicks leading to and following the display of dichotomous determinations.

I did 81/100 (not my first language) but I probably only knew 60 from before. But I speak other languages and so I can usually decode an origin of a word or I have seen other words in English or another language.

So it’s not a test of how many words you know but how good you are at guessing what words mean.

When there are two options that describe exactly the opposite of each other, it will be one of them. Reduced a bit the fun - but then again, for some words I understood what they are dealing with, but not whether positively or negatively.

UX suggestion to make going thought this much faster:

1. Frame each option with one key (1,2,3,4). User press 2, select the second option

2. Let the user change options if they want until they press Enter. Enter submits the answer.

3. Once submitted, another Enter brings the next one

This is great. I look forward to going through it after some of the suggested tweaks are applied! 100 seems daunting though.

Not sure what this is measuring. I did 30-40 words and got bored because the words are really basic. There's no challenge here. Not even a fun 5 minute game. These are basic English words, nothing extraordinarily hard to understand.

Pretty bad that there is no option of "I don't know". A couple of times I tried to guess the wrong word on purpose when I knew I had no clue what the word meant and accidentally got the right answer. I'd expect that admitting ignorance would be an option in such an app...

84 total, with this breakdown: Core Basics 19/20 Intermediate 20/20 Advanced 13/20 Expert 15/20 Grandmaster 17/20

Scientific Estimate: 69 100 word

It began very simple, so that I took it not very serious for a moment, but I never heard many of the later words. But thanks to knowing some latin and other languages, I could understand many of them.

A fun idea!

Good fun! At first I was scared of having to answer 100 questions, but when the words got more sophisticated it turned to be more engaging. Also, the result is good for self-esteem! :) Many thanks to the author!

I wonder if the test is calibrated to the fact that some answers are just well guessed? I am not a native English speaker, but I speak 3 languages overall and have basic notions in Latin, and I have to admit it helped a lot in "deciphering" a few words that I didn't know at all. And in at least 2 cases I just guessed correctly.

Cool idea, am working through.

It's annoying that you need to click 3 times per question, and the buttons are in 2 different places.

Maybe would be better to just let me click the answer I want and then instantly show me the next question?

Also who is Sandi?

This was fun! The progression seems logical.

I scored 71,000.

I got 75k words, which I’m happy with as a non-native speaker. Others here have also mentioned that the math may be off and that you can juice the game by looking at how answers are phrased etc.

I do wonder how much of these were “what AI thinks are hard words to know” vs. actually hard to know.

71050, not bad for a non native speaker I guess. I missed 9/100.

But to be honest many that might catch out a native speaker are just the Spanish/French/Latin word, so it was too easy in a way.

In addition to how much fun it was, it has potential pedagogic value for teaching sampling based estimation.

It would have paired well with an exposition of vanilla Monte Carlo and the benefits of stratified sampling.

Although stratified sampling is good, one can do better in this case by using adaptive sampling, where one uses a runtime (Bayesian) estimate of vocabulary to maximize information gain per question -- preferrentially sample from those strata where the current strata specific estimate has higher variance.

I ran through it twice, first time 91 second time 90, score: 69,500. Midwit confirmed.

I only got 4 wrong as a non-native speaker. Okay, I'm widely read in English, but among LLM-generated definitions it's just too easy to spot the right one.

I like this but it should be all operable with keyboard to be faster ie up down and 1234 for options and if its righht you just move on, maybe show synonyms in the success ui.

The sampling needs to be smarter than make me pick the meanings of 100 words. If I get the first two correct, it should skyrocket the difficulty and assume I’m okay with the easy words, not make me sit through more.

Haha, just pick the longest option and it will be right 90% of the time.

I used to do this in school tests too.

Pick the longest answer, you’re right 97% of the time.

This is true of any LLM-generated quiz.

I got 4 wrong but also I was getting weary and I made a couple of bad clicks.

Fun game! I did worse than many others here, only 69.9k estimated words. But then English is my second language, so I'm pretty pleased with the result!

I wish it had keyboard shortcuts, it's a bit of a sludge to click through twice.

Got 64,650: 20/19/17/18/12 (the intermediate one was a dumb mistake)

Interesting but tiring, I gave up the first time, but was curious because of the comments here and tried again, without much attention and taking some breaks. On my device I had to scroll to reach the “next” button.

Really interesting, but I would love to be able to express honestly when I just guessed. This way the result would be much more scientifically sound. Four answers have a 25% chance of random correctness, which is a bit high in my opinion. I think either adding a "I don't know" or a confidence level (Known/educated guess/wild guess) would help.

Got a bit boring then suddenly very hard with some really esoteric words at the end in the ‘grandmaster’ level. It’d be nice if it got progressively harder without levels.

Some definitions were not great and alternatives a little silly at times but on the whole seemed pretty accurate.

Also probably needs calibrated as 96/100 was projected to 77k words, what would the estimate be for 100/100?

Super high scores for the community!

I got 83/100 suggesting 60,000.

My SAT reading was 760/800.

Fun idea, I've been wanting to create something similar to track which vocab words I have mastered. Two nits: (1) no need for a "check" button as other commenters have noted and (2) the UI jitters a bit when submitting answers for each question - it's a bit disorienting!

“You mastered 98 new words! THE VERDICT

You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing.”

—- This sounds more like a cute assessment of only getting two words right. And what do you mean “new words”? It wasn’t until eighty-odd words in that I actually got a word I didn’t know and had to guess by ruling out multiple-choice options.

This reminds me of a learning resource that I can't find again: you start with an assessment of how many words you know and then you get new words in context with every session (and maybe some spaces repetition). It was mostly from newspaper articles and catered for every level of English. It was a website (ca 2013), not an app. Any ideas?

i wonder if multiple choice is the best method to test this. given the ubiquity of LLMs, perhaps an open ended, free text field would be better. that way you’re forced to define the word as you see fit and the LLM checks?

also, some of these words are actually not good ‘obscure vocabulary’ but trivia crap. overall a bit AI slop and too easy.

For anyone who wants to take a real scaled vocabulary test, you can't beat the one given with Johnson O'Connor's aptitude tests.

I wish the option was just “yes I know this word” or “no I don’t”. Reading the definitions takes too long for so many words

Find the pair of antonyms, and the answer will be one of those.

Needs keyboard support ASAP. Using the mouse for something like this is a waste of time.

This dearly needs a "Don't know" or a "Skip" option.

Also, as others have said, mixing easy and difficult words would make the process less boring.

I got too many Greek words which obviously I got them right( guess why). does this qualify me as someone good at English words and their meaning?

Super fun, got 70,250. Friends have always lightly ribbed me for having to go home and look up words i've used. Those remaining 100k words must be really obscure.

One suggestion would be more convincing decoy choices, some were pretty silly. But I have no idea how they come up with them.

Some of the definitions offered are slightly short of what I expect. Like for "Obsequious" it offers "obedient to an excessive or servile degree" which isn't wrong, but it misses the expression of a sort of noisy eagerness in that servility.

I got 70,750 which is much higher than I expected. The early words were obvious. However, a lot of the later questions I could only answer because they were multiple choice. If I had to actually come up with a definition, I suspect my score would be much lower.

It might be nice if you could unlock a "hard mode" or ability to the first 1-3 levels after a first run. I scored a little over 81K and considered playing again because I like quizzes, but doing another batch of (to me) easy words seemed like a waste.

multiple choice is a cheat. the real test is whether you can define the word without seeing a menu of options to pick from.

I notice that the concept related to the right answer sometimes has an opposite counterpart.

The UX is awful - I bailed out at 25/100 JUST IN LEVEL ONE (BASICS)

Might I suggest adaptive difficulty? After getting 10, 15, 20 correct in a row it should scale up the difficulty immediately, rather than waiting for 100 in the basic level 1...

I got an estimate of 70,550, from a score of 87/100 (20/18/16/17/16). Not native English speaker.

I suppose the words must be weighed, because other people in the thread with more correct words got a not much higher estimate.

43000.. It says I am a person of few words, and albeit true, I actually thought I did well... Until to started doing some crazy words...

It told me to read the dictionary.

88/100, scores were 20/20/18/14/16. Born & raised in western Canada fwiw.

Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise :D

My score: 78,000 words, 20/20/19/18/18.

apparently 54,000. Seems like it is including even fictional words though in this test (like from fiction novels). Ironically I scored higher on the expert words (18/20) than the "advanced" words (11/20)

Not native English speaker (Norwegian), score: 55500.

But many of the hard words were quite similar to more common words we have here.

Please move the continue button closer to the options. I had to make my window smaller to avoid having to run between them with the mouse.

Also add a keyboard focus state on the continue button.

I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.

Too much time spent on the basics, honestly. I'm at word 20 and still on the basics?

Each word is a double-click.

The correct response for each word is ALMOST always the longest answer.

70k, which I believe is a fine result for a second language.

Stopped at "bumbershoot" because that's a nonsense Americanism[0] and life's too short to be giving credence to that madness.

[0] https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/11/bumbershoot-it-mean... "the digital archive of the Times of London, comprising 7,696,959 articles published between 1785 and 1985, yields precisely zero hits for bumbershoot"

76250, or 93/100. Native English speaker from London. Some of the last 10 words were seriously obscure.

Are accoutrement and ziggurat really English words? Accoutrement is even pronounced as French!

I like how it tests whether I know 170k words by requiring me to click on 170k words 3 times each

There are no hard words in this puzzle. This is all basic English.

Almost every correct answer is a longer string than the other multiple choice options.

Not a very good test. Too easy to guess many of the words, and the words seem to follow a theme. For example my list had five or six that had to do with speaking too much or too little (verbose, lugubrious, and a few others in that vein). And many easy words were placed late in the test (e.g. zeitgeist, facetious being in the expert and grand master categories?).

And it didn't even tell me at the end how many words I know!

There is a similar variant of such a test where you just go down a list of words of increasing obscurity, ticking the ones you are familiar with. If you do this once or twice, you can get a fairly good estimate of the actual number of words you know.

This is something that could be done for other languages, word lists are easy.

I’m not sure how you’d gauge what knowing each word would indicate.

Also adequate options, that sound plausible.

Was excited to take the test, even at 100 words, until I realized I had to manually click every input.

Test could be completed in 1/5 of the time if the user could use numeral keys [1, 2, 3, 4] plus "enter" to input selections instead of the cursor.

This felt like it had the stink of AI on it and I was second-guessing myself about it: I don't play these kinds of trivia / questionnaire type games a lot, so maybe some of what I'm feeling comes from plain unfamiliarity.

But no - other people pointed out the same things I noticed, such as many of the wrong answers being very weird.

This could have been a neat game, but it is ruined by being unrefined AI slop.

Literally when I got to advanced and beyond just picking the longer and more complicated looking answer was the right one. I think this test is extremely flawed.

Some felt too easily guessable. Too many joke answers maybe?

My native language Spanish, it actually helps with words like tergiversate, got 55,900.

All the 3 incorrect answers are just indirect opposites of the correct one.Quite easy to determine which is correct, even without knowing the word

I enjoyed some of the incorrect options. For "Debilitate" one of the options was "Remove a bill from the tab".

Gaikwar - which I was able to guess was a former Indian state seems irrelevant as an “English” word especially given it seems to derive from a name that I have to assume is native to the region.

I am trying to keep a subset. I don't aim for perfection so knowing all words is rather a pointless exercise in futility.

The longest answer is the correct answer for a lot of the questions

81,250 97/100 without being a native speaker. Although truth be told only because I figured out how to guess well.

As a fluent native speaker who has read thousands of books and sometimes reads dictionary entries for fun, a number of these definitions are actually slightly off.

"Verbose," for instance, is defined as "Using more words than are needed."

That's not exactly wrong, but it's kind of misleading. "Verbose" explicitly means using a large pile of words, drowning the reader in far more words than are strictly necessary.

"More words than are needed" could be as limited as "used a three-word construction in a sentence where it could have been one."

There are many more like this.

Please, I beg all of you - don't use LLMs to generate linguistic slop that claims to be linguistic education.

I weep for the world that is to come.

I had no idea there was an English word specifically to describe throwing someone out of a window. Defenestrate.

Please add keyboard controls

59,400 - It said I'm a person of few words. It also recommended I read a dictionary. I feel some kind of way about that. :D

Fun!

I bet non-native speakers know more English words.

Scientific Estimate: 36,250. Nah, I'm far worse.

Probably not too bad for a person whose native language is not English.

why use many word when few word do trick

Nice tool - would love it if I could press a number on the keyboard to select and rapidly move through them.

Getting "Obfuscate" as #99 and "Quixotic" as #100 made me feel exorbitantly smart.

Only got 63,150 words. Considering English is the 3rd language I learned, I think I did pretty well.

Apparently I know 70,000 words... I got 90 out of 100 and it thinks I'm Stephen Fry!

78,250 is way more than I expected. I sure don't feel like I know 78,000 words.

Ignoring the validity of the test, one of the more strange things I noticed is that apparently native English speakers only have a total vocabulary of 15k to 35k words? I probably live in a bubble, but that seems profoundly low.

i remember of such a link in July 2011 but i could only find that one which is a bit different

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806377

Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise?

79k. Missed three from the last group: Vagitus, Yarborough, and Quire.

Lethargic had an option "having the quality of lethargy".

That sounds like a good application of Item Response Theory (IRT).

The wrong answers were generated by AI, and for nearly every entry 2 could be eliminated, so even a monkey can get 50% right.

Improve the wrong answers to be closer to the correct answer, to test the subject’s mastery.

Anyone who has practiced standardized tests would do well on this, even with poor vocab.

Also, too many Britishisms

Nice. I want one in Spanish so I can compare results.

For those interested in the nature of the later, harder words but not willing to work through the earlier sets, here are the ones from my run:

Level 0: Core Basics Abundant, Baffle, Candid, Dwell, Emerge, Frugal, Generic, Hinder, Impartial, Jovial, Knack, Lucid, Meager, Naive, Obsolete, Peculiar, Quench, Refute, Seldom, Tedious, Unique, Valid, Wary, Yearn, Zeal, Adequate, Barren, Coarse, Diligent, Esteem, Fickle, Gloom, Hoax, Ignite, Jolt, Keen, Linger, Mend, Numb, Omit, Pledge, Quota, Rural, Soothe, Toxic, Urge, Vow, Witty, Yield.

Level 1: Intermediate Acumen, Benevolent, Complacent, Dilapidated, Eloquent, Fabricate, Gregarious, Hypothetical, Imminent, Juxtapose, Lethargic, Meticulous, Nostalgia, Oblivious, Pragmatic, Reiterate, Scrutinize, Tentative, Ubiquitous, Verbose, Wane, Aesthetic, Bolster, Candor, Defer, Elicit, Furtive, Glut, Heed, Impeccable, Lament, Modicum, Notorious, Opulent, Plausible, Resilient, Stagnant, Trivial, Viable, Zenith.

Level 2: Advanced Alleviate, Breviary, Cacophony, Deferential, Ephemeral, Fastidious, Garrulous, Harangue, Iconoclast, Juggernaut, Laconic, Magnanimous, Nefarious, Obsequious, Paradigm, Recalcitrant, Sanguine, Taciturn, Ubiquity, Vacillate, Winsome, Zephyr, Abase, Banal, Capricious, Debilitate, Ebullient, Facetious, Gaikwar, Hackneyed, Idiosyncrasy, Jargon, Kindle, Labyrinth, Maverick, Narcissism, Ostracize, Palliate, Quagmire, Rancorous, Sagacity, Tantamount.

Level 3: Expert Abstemious, Bellicose, Chicanery, Deleterious, Enervate, Fatuous, Gauche, Hegemony, Inculcate, Jejune, Kowtow, Lugubrious, Mawkish, Nonsectarian, Obdurate, Pernicious, Quotidian, Recapitulate, Supercilious, Tempestuous, Unctuous, Vehement, Winnow, Xenophobe, Ziggurat, Acquiesce, Bombastic, Circumlocution, Desultory, Equinox, Fiduciary, Gerrymandering, Hubris, Incognito, Kinetic, Loquacious, Metamorphosis, Nihilism, Orthography, Precipitous, Quasar, Reparation, Soliloquy.

Level 4: Grandmaster (The Obscure) Accoutrement, Brobdingnagian, Crepuscular, Defenestrate, Equanimity, Flibbertigibbet, Grandiloquent, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Ineffable, Jingoism, Kerfuffle, Logorrhea, Mellifluous, Obfuscate, Panacea, Quixotic, Rococo, Sesquipedalian, Tergiversate, Ultracrepidarian, Vicissitude, Weltschmerz, Xeric, Yclept, Zeitgeist, Absquatulate, Bumbershoot, Callipygian, Dord, Ergophobia, Fartlek, Gobbledygook, Houghmagandy, Interrobang, Kakistocracy, Lollygag, Mumpsimus, Nudiustertian, Omphaloskepsis, Pogonotrophy, Quire, Ratoon, Snollygoster, Tittynope, Ucalegon, Vagitus, Widdershins, Xylopolist, Yarborough, Zenzizenzizenzic.

Love it, thanks for sharing!

That was a nice diversion. I got 76,750.

This was my result. I am clueless who Stephen Fry is.

SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE 74,000 words "Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

You mastered 93 new words! THE VERDICT

You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing. REQUIRED READING

Read the dictionary from A to Z. It's a gripping tale with a terrible plot.

The words clearly are not random. I don't know how the author chose the word bank, but it's not a representative sample. It's all fairly common words and then intentionally silly words that are very long (Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia), that wouldn't really appear from a random sample as frequently as they do. I tested myself from my own Webster's collegiate dictionary some years ago with actually random words and the results were way off compared to this.

Why not add keyboard shortcuts? Would make a much more polished desktop experience.

The four options were generally:

* Correct word * Opposite definition * Another word's definition * Opposite of that word's definition

Which massively reduces the difficulty

I got 74,400

You mastered 88 new words!

> You know 60000 words, that’s not a lot, go back to reading the dictionary

Goes to the about section: an average native speaker knows 35000 words.

Ah yes, the classic British insult, should have known it.

At least three

100%!

They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha.

Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other.

This is why when people tell me I'm wrong, so often I feel smarter than they are. HN quizzes are conditioning me for some antisocial attitudes, I think.

A couple

The words are so easy that this is pointless, and three clicks per word means I'm not going to get to the harder ones at the end. A proper spread of very difficult words split between scientific, historical, artistic, linguistic, colloquial, old, new, colonial, etc would give a better sampling. If I know "palimpsest" I probably know "pledge" you don't need to cover much of the easy stuff.

The initial section is way too long. Perhaps do an exponential difficulty increase?

I got 93 words (not a native speaker), but the expert/grandmaster words were kinda easy?

> You mastered 100 new words!

No, I read about 97 words I already knew and guessed at a couple of made-up ones like "snollygoster".

Is this what passes for an advanced vocabulary in the US?

Also, it took far too many clicks per word, pretty tedious stuff.

WAY too many clicks per word. One, max.

The green button (which should not exist) was also hidden under Firefox for Android's address bar until I tried to "scroll* to hide it.

"How much time would you be willing spend on a poll just for the ego boost of being told your vocabulary is large?"

... got 95. Can't believe there's a word for a neighbor whose house is on fire.

76

70,900

That was fun! tho a lot were cuz the longer the answer, the more likely it was to be right (for words I had utterly no clue)

Was really hard to stop once started lol

Funny that lots of words can be guessed correctly if one knows a few European languages. I speak Dutch, German, Russian, English and was able to recognize most of the words without ever using it in English. For example Seldom. It's very similar to Zelden in Dutch. I would never use the word Seldom though.

Seems too easy compared to the other tests like that I I've taken (my wife and I have a mini thing about this cause as in immigrant I'm not legally allowed to win at Scrabble but I do occasionally), I got 3 wrong and guessed maybe 3 more correctly without knowing them (vibe based i was usually between the two), getting 77k. That seems improbable... Also kinda lazy with many expert words where the longest definition is correct more often than not.

I got 75,150

The triple click is annoying.

I mean, select the word, then press check, then press continue.

It could be one single click and move to the next, show me my last result at the same time you ask me for the next one.

I got 98 words right and it estimated I know 82k words. That's less than half the quoted 170k number, so what would it have estimated at 99 or at 100?

I was doing well until I got to grandmaster.

Then I was doing poorly in grandmaster, until I realize you can ace grandmaster by just picking the longest explanation every time.

Cool concept. but...

Vibe coders need to be forced to spend one day learning basic CSS before they're allowed to use an LLM to make a website and the internet would be a lot more pleasant as we move forward with slopification.. It doesn't have to be sloppy, and doesn't take all that much studying to at least be able to steer an llm in the right direction to make something look nice. At this point everything is just the same 3 colors and a centered flex column with weird spacing.

this is a test for willingness to put up with the whole 100. It says something.

3 clicks per is what gives it away. and the little compliments. and that it's 100 questions

67900

English is not my native language. I get my vocabulary from browsing the Internet. There is no way I know that many words.

whenever I run out of words I know, I make new ones.

The UI reminds me of another language-related app...

when you don’t know the right answer is always the longest one…

> "Yield: Produce or provide a natural product"

Eh?

Meh. The UX should be able to simply have the selection indicate it is the choice rather than having to submit it too. It's too cumbersome to click through...

[dead]

I know maybe 20-30. I'm aware of maybe a few thousand.

I use the language to understand not get an effect

Interesting, I don't have the time to go through 100 though and having to click on answer and then mouse down to continue is a slog.

Fun fact: there's a test you can do called wordsum which correlates extremely highly, like .71, to IQ. It's just asking you 10 vocabulary questions. It turns out knowing advanced vocabulary correlates really well to IQ.

It marked this definition for “Candid” as incorrect. “Secretive and very guarded”

But Candid can certainly mean secretive, as in “Candid camera”.