I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the <i>non-native</i> speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live).<p>This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-out), and use English on a daily basis. I also watch most movies in English (very seldom for people in a German speaking country to do), read some English novels, and also most non-fiction books I have are in English. Internet use is nearly English only.<p>Still, I probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker. After 17 years of learning and using the language, and at least 10 years of that using it _daily_.<p>Ouch.
I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked was real.
For those of you concerned with your score, you are deovting an undue amount of your time in discussing the results of what is—let's be honest with ourselves—the literati version of a "Are U A Vampire Or A Werewolf?" quiz.<p>P.S., 36,700 .. I took this before it got a lot of general circulation, and my standings have improved considerably. I suspect this makes me more worthy of oxygen.
19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even <i>my age group</i>, let alone the general populace (I'm 20).<p>That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm not familiar with. Most of the ones I missed are words I recognize from this series, although since I'm not 100% sure of them, so I left them unchecked.
I strongly doubt that their methodology has any validity at all for non-native speakers. Extrapolating from a selection of 60-80 words presupposes a relatively normal developmental history; otherwise one would not be able to draw the primary inference at work here, namely that somebody who knows a definition for "mawkish" knows definitions for all words of similar difficulty and frequency.<p>Atypical language acquisition (e.g., as a second language, or through a non-standard channel like technology or fantasy literature) disrupts this extrapolation step. For instance, a German programmer that knows the word "polymorphic" via OOP is less likely to know similarly frequent and difficult but programming-unrelated words than British or American peers. So adding, say, 100 to the total would be utterly unfounded. Same thing for a science-fiction nerd: Acquaintance with obscure words from one domain doesn't extrapolate to other domains.<p>Unless they somehow control for domain specificity and atypical acquisition, let's not get too frustrated. (<i>Disclaimer</i>: Not a native speaker -- result around median.)
Their statistic is probably inflated due to linguistic subreddit, where this test originated:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_created_this_site_to_measure_the_size_of/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_...</a>
"Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of."<p>This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context.<p>Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the word used some 78 times in the past few months, and I'm sure I've encountered the word a few dozen times before. I know it's a slightly undesirable horse of some kind. Likely this means it's a gelding or a small pony-ish horse. Do I need to have looked up and remembered the three specific submeanings of the word, or that it's a specific breed of horse from Galloway to be able to say I am "exactly sure of" the word?<p>I don't think that's how language works, but it's how this test seems to want it to work. My score of 35,300 is suspect on multiple levels.
lots of people here are saying they scored lower than what they expected, and that maybe other people cheated. that could be it, but it could also be that hacker news folks tend to be overconfident. this would match the stereotype of this group being mainly male nerd entreprenuers, which could score worse on things like this but perceive themselves to score much higher (a feeling not a fact backed by studies that i can remember). who knows; just voicing this thought since no one has mentioned it yet.
Just as a test, ticking all the boxes scores 45,000 words. Which seems to indicate that they haven't seeded the quiz with fake words to weed out cheaters : Pity, since there was an opportunity to unbias it in at least one dimension. (I also tried deselecting just 1 of a few of the really tough words : Each one caused the score to lower).
Obvious point : The only people interested in finding out their scores will be the kind of people who think their vocab is something worth competing on. There's no way this is a fair sample across all English-speakers.
Don't care too much for percentile and age stats at the end.. clearly doesn't represent general pop.<p>What IS interesting tho, from a language learners perspective, is the vocab size estimation. A metric a lot of us use as a rough benchmark of vocab needed for <i>fluency</i> in a foreign language is 10,000words.
Comparing this with what an educated adult native speaker knows in their own language (using my own truthful score of 24k) is pretty interesting.<p>Would love to have something like this to quickly gauge my vocab in other languages!
The psychology of these things is interesting to me. My reflexive reaction was, of course, "I have to know!" and then my immediate counter-reaction was "This is just intellectual phallometry and is ultimately of no consequence to me."<p>Of course, I very quickly rationalized away the counter-reaction and took the test anyway, and then considered sharing it with my friends. What drives this?
I scored 38500 - seemed to be a test that would be helped by reading a lot of older fantasy literature, where 'terpsichorean' and 'turpitude' (to give a couple 'terp' examples that spring to mind) are the sort of words that authors like Jack Vance liked to wheel out in order to create a mood.<p>I'm not sure that the people suggesting that the failure to correlate with the SAT adds much; I don't think the SAT really goes all-out of the more flowery bits of archaic vocabulary in the way that this test did.<p>My 3rd grade son got 10200, and enjoyed discussing the words he didn't get. I think every 3rd grader should know "mawkish". :-)
I only scored 24k which seems low based on the statistics at the end. I also only selected words that I absolutely knew the definition of, even though some I think I knew based on the root.<p>Memorizing trivia words is just something that has never interested me. Instead I keep a thesaurus and dictionary handy at all times :)
<a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953</a><p>37,100 I'm ashamed I didn't do better. I'm considerably older than the average HN reader. I did degrees in 4 different subjects (mind you, I was classed officially as retarded at my high school - in the same classes as the arsonists).<p>So no-one should feel the score is that important. I'm a very mediocre programmer. I'd much rather halve my vocab score to double my maths ability.
I got 28,800 <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38317" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38317</a> So apparently I should be 31 instead of almost 21.<p>I had a phase around 7th through 10th grade where I thought learning lots of vocabulary would make me smarter, especially words others didn't know well. (And so I'd use them in English essays for Extra Points since your grades are often determined by how little sense you make, because if the reader doesn't understand it obviously it's too smart for them!) I also had a general grammar nazi-ism.<p>Anyway, I think this exchange kind of tipped me over the edge to stop caring. (Of course that's led to forgetting a lot.)<p>William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."<p>Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."<p>Of course, having some background in French and Latin probably helps for inferring a few words.
Ah, cool I know 80 english words. There must be something utterly wrong with how this test works in opera mini, clicking on continue on page two brought me to page one, going back and clicking continue again gave me just a subset of the choices from page one... (at least I guess it is 80, the number was displayed right over the middle of the word "words" in the result captcha).
Just from getting some friends to do this it seems to me the median score overall and the median score for each age are a bit inflated. Just my thoughts, but I think people aren't being 100% truthful. Although I may just have a poor vocabulary <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36208" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36208</a>
"You will never become proficient in a foreign language by studying vocabulary lists.
Rather, you must hear and speak (or read and write) the language to gain proficiency.
The same is true for learning computer languages."<p>Coincidentally, I just happened to come across this quote in Peter Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming".
I was actually a bit surprised, not by the specific number of words (that seems reasonably fair given some statistics posted above on this thread), but on the percentage ranking. I'm a doctoral student whose vocabulary score was in the 96th percentile on the GRE and I knew every word when I took the WAIS-IV. Here, my score of 28,300 is just a bit above average. Either people are lying (possible) or this curve is clearly not a normal curve representative of the population (most likely). I'm a pretty avid reader, even though most of the older authors like Dickens bore me (thanks ADD!), but the person that came up with those words is possibly the most voracious reader I have ever met.<p>I also just realized that taking the test primed me to write in a way more intelligently sounding manner than I usually do. Not an LOL in sight!
I realise that the ego-stroking scoring is the driver behind this site's popularity , but I would also like to see definitions of words that I missed. It's pretty daunting to spend hours copying and pasting words into Google (well, ahem, maybe it is for some of us!)
I am a non-native speaker (NNS) and got 15.700.<p>I think this test is not very telling for NNSs as it doesn't consider specialist vocabulary which many of us have a lot of of, because of how we /really/ learned the language.<p>When I left school my English was very average. When I started communicating with email with people from all over the world, but mostly the US, it improved a lot in 1-2 years.
When I first went to a congress in the US in my med 20's I was blown away by my aptitude to communicate in that language.<p>But these were all people from my field. What I'm saying is that the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is severely skewed by the field I work in -- visual effects (and IT).
I believe this goes for many NNSs.
Very interesting. The details on how it works are here: <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/details.php" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/details.php</a><p>(My result:)
<a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35795" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35795</a>
Learning to program did help. I could check "shard" and "bloat", which are apparently quite rare in general context compared to words I know.<p>How about you? Were there words you could check because you encountered it often in programming context?
Site creator here -- what a surprise to wake up this morning, see my inbox full of messages about this site, and discover that everyone was coming from Hacker News, which I visit every day!<p>Thanks for all the participation, and comments -- I didn't submit this myself, so thanks, mike_esspe.<p>I've responded to a few points down below; there's a lot more info on the details of the test at:<p><a href="http://testyourvocab.com/faq.php" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/faq.php</a>
<a href="http://testyourvocab.com/details.php" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/details.php</a>
13700
German, 22 years old<p>I had 9 years of English in school. Because of my hobbies I read a lot of stuff in English. I also watched many TV shows and spent about 6 month living in Australia.<p>Yet I feel insecure even typing this. Knowing lots of words is one thing. But what makes it hard are all the subtleties you have to take care of when building sentences. I also think that I get grammar wrong most of the time.<p>Another thing is that my sentences are almost always way too long.<p>As someone else pointed out before: I don't want my former English teacher to read this, either.
Think I have the lowest score here. 16,400 words. English is not my native language but I speak English daily and I wouldn't say my English is bad. Pretty disappointed with the score and also surprised the median is way way higher than I expected.<p>Edit: And, also to add, I followed 2 criteria for whether I know the word or not.<p>1. What's the absolute definition?<p>2. And can I find the equivalent or meaning of it in my native language? (which is Tamil, an Indian language, if anyone cares.)
I scored only 20400, but it makes me ask myself: Perhaps I was being too honest? There were certainly words I'd seen before, and could make educated guesses as to the general meanings of, but I chose not to check those off.<p>I'm Canadian born and raised, with English as my first language. Honestly, I'm surprised to be told I'm that far below the median and average.
It seems to be fairly accurate. Maybe it isn't. My score: <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822</a><p>Edit: I just had a look at the median word count for adults who took the survey. It's around 27,000. I wonder whether that's true or not.. it seems to me that I'm lacking.
Putting aside all the comparing. Many non-native speakers here say they read and watch many things in english. I do that do and I'm quite positive that 95% of all the reading and listening I do each day is in english.<p>Now with a low score of 17500 I wonder, if it isn't enough to completely endulge oneself in the language, what is?<p>Of course, watching the Simpsons all day won't teach me some of the rarely used words. But there must be some stepping stones. I still haven't read Wuthering Heights because I don't want to have a dictionary lying around just to understand the story. And looking up something, reading on and forgetting it at the end of the day is quite common for me.<p>Also I'm sure that 15 year old americans haven't read that many novels, still their vocabulary is supposed to be larger than most of the well read non-native speakers around here.
I was really surprised by the result of this. I was flipping through a friends learner's Chinese-English dictionary that claimed to contain over 150,000 words and in a couple minutes of thumbing through it I didn't find any I didn't know. But on this test, I didn't even get 50,000. Then according to the info at the bottom, the median was far less than that.<p>Honestly I think the evaluation method is terrible. My collection of sci-fi/fantasy books alone probably contain over 100,000 headwords. A single biology text book might be as many as they claim the median person knows. Avid WoW players would similarly destroy the curve (if the test included the kinds of words they'd know instead of archaic religious words),
I only checked words that I can use in a sentence: left one blank on the first set, a handful blank on the second set.<p>42,500 (<a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216</a>)<p>Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...
I'm a non-native speaker and I fare pretty well with reading stuff but I'm a bit chocked at my result (< 19k).<p>The thing I find a bit funny is that of all the words I didn't check I've seen almost all of them in books and articles. When I see them in a sentence and in context I do understand them fine but I can't give a definition for them.<p>I wonder if this is common when reading another language? It might be a better idea to look up the words in a dictionary when seeing them but I just can't be bothered, after seeing them in context a few times I can usually get a feel for their meanings. There are a few exceptions to be sure, adjectives are particularly bad at this.
Got 21,500 or so. Even as a non-native speaker I was slightly disappointed with this result. Many of the words were just ridiculously obscure and esoteric, and I haven't even seen some of them anywhere in the literature I read.
37,700 <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36826" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36826</a> without cheating and not counting ones that I only thought I could puzzle out.<p>Maybe working on that English Minor is panning out...
I didn't see any science-related words when I took the test. Not sure if this is because of the process by which they made the word lists, or because there truly are not many common science-related words.
I'm guessing they selected words from a large corpus of written English based on their relative frequency.<p>It isn't surprising that there isn't any technical vocabulary. Most technical vocabulary falls into one of the following categories:
a) Acronyms
b) Overloading of existing non-technical words
c) Names and other proper nouns
d) Phrases longer than one word<p>There's actually an argument for excluding highly specific vocabulary (some corpuses explicitly exclude textbooks for this reason) because knowledge of them doesn't correlate as well with overall vocabulary.
22,700 <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38336" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38336</a><p>What difference does it make? The site doesn't say what it means in everyday life. I'm guessing if you exclude high achieving SAT vocab nerds, it finds the difference between people who care about the meaning of each word and people who will guess through context because they have no patience for a dictionary. Or people who don't read fancy texts, like the Scarlett Letter for example, after failing to read that I stopped reading books.
29,500, non-native English speaker (but studied in the US). Retook the test and omitted all the words I could not define with total confidence on the spot; the original score was 31,400. The test is peculiar in that the distribution appears to be uneven. Subjectively there is a sharp break between words that one would know from Shakespeare, Tolkien and Dunsany, and words no one would ever know unless they studied the OED. For statistical significance they would need more words.
I just just "5,340" as a result, this is an hint for me that I spend too much time trying to improve my hearing skills and too little trying to learn words outside the domain I mostly use English for (computers, programming, technology, ...).<p>I wonder if there is some good web site that helps you learning new words. An iPhone application will also work for me, but I need one that is able to also tell me the sound of the word. I searched a bit in the past without good results.
I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off.<p>When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I dismiss most options because they're much too obscure.
Along with many of the flaws already adressed, the most relevant for me was "absolutely sure of" and also taking the words out of context. There were a good number of words that I was pretty sure I knew and had I read them in context would have been correct in my meaning and never given it a second thought.<p>I'm certain that if I took this same test using a base of 'novel in fulltext' vs. 'list of all unique words in the novel', my recog would be FAR better on the novel.
12,900: <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=39955" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=39955</a><p>I am not a native speaker and I was happy to get more than >10,000, really.
Most interesting to me were the words I recognized, but weren't sure of their meaning (e.g. malapropism, which turned out to mean <i>ludicrous misuse of a word</i>).<p>BTW: a nice thing about online dictionaries is they have sound files for pronunciation. e.g. <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/malapropism" rel="nofollow">http://www.thefreedictionary.com/malapropism</a> With a plugin, you can highlight and right-click to open in another tab.
Speaking English does not expand your vocabulary. You must read to encounter the larger portion of the dictionary. Does this test select for computer-users who don't read?<p>32800
If you found this test engaging, then it might be time to give this a go again... <a href="http://freerice.com/" rel="nofollow">http://freerice.com/</a>
I scored far lower than I thought I would, and am genuinely surprised given that I tend to write a lot and have always thought I had a decent vocabulary.<p>I would love to be able to compare my score to what it would have been before moving to a non-English country and learning/speaking a new language. I definitely feel that a large part of my memory is now dedicated to Japanese and not English...
No matter how many I did (I'm fine, thanks), I would love to see a similar system that estimates one's vocabulary using already existing articles.<p>To put aside the ego matters, I'm curious if there are any interesting correlations for writings published in magazines. For instance, between the estimated vocabulary size and the average price for ads (I bet that there is a huge correlation.)
I got 35,900, and haven't lived in an English-speaking country in 10 years. I often get frustrated at myself when I feel like I'm losing my vocab. There were a couple of words on the list that I'm sure I once knew, but couldn't conjure up the meaning on the spot, so I skipped them. I was never a sci-fi/fantasy fan, but I do like to read literature for fun.
I got ~12K, but I highly doubt the accuracy... I suspect that I know ~1K words, maybe 2K. I remember hearing that people usually use around 100 or 200 distinct words/day.<p>According to <a href="http://math.ucdenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/shakespeare.html" rel="nofollow">http://math.ucdenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/shakespeare.html</a>, Shakespeare used ~32K words in all of his works.
I moved to the US from Russia when I was 10, and my vocabulary is a pathetic 18,000 or so.
Which is funny, because I consider myself pretty well-read. I usually just infer the meaning of new words through their context without looking them up so I don't feel comfortable saying I know the definition of those words.
My result[1] isn't too bad but there's still quite a few words I can learn especially at the end. I did cheat a little since I learned a few of the more curious looking ones when this showed up on /b/ 2 nights ago.<p>[1] <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36123" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36123</a>
Wouldn't a multiple choice quiz with definitions be more accurate? Force people to choose a definition (or none of the above?) to show they actually know the word. You'd still have the issue of cheaters but at least you would know people just don't assume they know the definition of "like"
Some of these don't look like real words (e.g. splarge, which is definitely something that you could make up). I assume they're real, though.<p>Anyway, my score: <a href="http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192" rel="nofollow">http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192</a>
I'm almost 26 and I scored 26,500.<p>Not sure I buy the results though. I would think that the rate of increase would start to decrease quite significantly after high school/college but it appears to stay pretty much linear throughout the data.
Your sample is heavily skewed toward the literate.<p>Add Education (None,HighS,BS,MS,PhD) as a research statistic and compare it to the national average. I would bet that your sample is greater than 2 Standard Deviations from the mean.
There were some obscure words in there. Interestingly, I only ticked boxes that I could envision Pip Boy (Fallout VG) drawings of. Ending up with a score of ~23k, which was below average.
I took the opposite approach.<p>I checked all the boxes on the first page but one, "vibrissae" (roughly, whiskers), and saw even more boxes on the second page and groaned. So I punted, and went back to the first page, reloaded it, and checked only one box: vibrissae.<p>After finding 17 words on the second page, I left them all blank, following the same methodology. My vocabulary size was estimated to be 20 words.<p>From this, I deduced that my total vocabulary size was all the words ever known to any English speaker anywhere, anytime - minus 20.<p>This made me very pleased with myself, even though I knew my assumptions were pretty terrible.<p>(Interesting that the spell check in my browser doesn't recognize vibrissae.)
lampoon: verb: Publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule or sarcasm.<p>I knew lampoon had something to do with criticism, so I checked the box, but I had no idea that the definition specified a public context. Does that mean I didn't know the word?<p>I suspect a problem with the test is that it's easy to know enough to figure out the gist of a word's definition without having any knowledge of the specificity of the definition, if that makes any sense.
I scored a mere 25,700-something. Based upon my ability to regularly, inadvertently stump spell-checkers and random humans alike, I will continue to assume that I have an above-average vocabulary. :-)
Shocking, 9885. I acquired current command on English via Internet, Harry Potter and Klan Academy - and I was pretty comfortable making points in English than in Japanese<p>I could use some help boosting my vocabulary...
My god, none of this shit matters! Why does anyone put any stock in any of this kind of thing? The best a test can do is make you feel smug, the worst it can do is totally destroy your confidence. It's a lose-lose proposition.