How many of the 170k English words do you know?

dtagames

This was fun! The progression seems logical. I scored 71,000.

itsamario

I know maybe 20-30. I'm aware of maybe a few thousand. I use the language to understand not get an effect

goldenarm

It's hilarious that most of these words are French

yorwba

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

fritzo

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

pastel8739

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

jstanley

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?

cm2012

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.

Laurel1234

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.

trevwebdev

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.

archildress

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

kiaofz

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

notsylver

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

jrrv

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.

fl4regun

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)

croisillon

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

WesleyJohnson

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!

hmokiguess

why use many word when few word do trick

sd9

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).

mcbetz

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?