
Estimate your English vocabulary size - mike_esspe
http://testyourvocab.com/
======
gimpf
I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the _non-native_ 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).

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.

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_.

Ouch.

~~~
pavlov
I got a score of 26,000. I'm Finnish, and actually learned French as a second
language in school and English as third.

I've never lived in an English-speaking country, but English is so prevalent
in Finland these days that I wouldn't be surprised if it gained some kind of
official status within the next 50 years. Whether in formal meetings or
informal bar encounters, people voluntarily switch to English if there's even
one non-Finn present. In my field, this happens nearly every day.

I even use English to communicate with Swedes, even though Swedish is the
second official language of Finland and I studied it for 6 years... There's no
point in limping through the conversation with my childish Swedish, when it's
99% guaranteed that Swedes speak English.

~~~
krmmalik
Holy wowsers. I grew up in England, and i only scored 14,800 on the test!
Although English isnt my native language, i did speak it from a very early
age.

~~~
nuromancer
I was completely honest scoring 16,000, English is my one and only language.
Depending on your field/background you could understand more words than this
test suggests. Looking up the words that i did not understand coupling them
with there relevance and the shear volume of test words or lack thereof makes
this test inaccurate in my mind.

------
Eliezer
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.

~~~
Robin_Message
I just counted, and you've used at least 12685 dictionary words in HP:MOR [1].
I was expecting it to be more to be honest, but it didn't seem right not to
post just because it didn't match my expectations.

It certainly seems unlikely that someone who can produce an excellent 500,000
word work of fiction (aside: thanks very much by the way,) in addition to
reams of technical writing, has a vocabulary not in the 95th percentile of the
population. OTOH, HP:MOR has fewer words in it than I expected, and even the
upper bound of 14795 seems low. Maybe the working is wrong; it's shown below.

    
    
        $ cat Harry\ Potter\ and\ the\ Methods\ of\ Rationality\ 1-72.txt |
        tr -cs 'a-zA-Z' '[\n*]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' |
        sort --uniq | cat - /usr/share/dict/words | sort |
        awk '{count[$1]++; if (count[$1]==2) print}' | wc -l
        12685
    
        $ cat Harry\ Potter\ and\ the\ Methods\ of\ Rationality\ 1-72.txt |
        tr -cs 'a-zA-Z' '[\n*]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' |
        sort --uniq | wc -l
        14795
    
    

[1]
[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality)
— Eliezer's amazing Harry Potter fanfiction in case you're missing out.

~~~
jtheory
There's a huge difference between writing something targeted at a selected
audience, in a given time period, limited range of topics the characters will
discuss, etc. and listing out all of the vocabulary words you know personally
across all domains of knowledge. Even though HP:MoR Harry has a broad
vocabulary, for example, and may use some words not all readers will know,
there are still tons of topics (with their own specialized vocabulary...) that
will never come up in the written storyline -- even if Harry would know them
well.

Harry also presumably does some practical limiting of his vocabulary in
conversation, because only shared vocabulary is useful if you're trying to
actually communicate and don't want to stop to give definitions all the time.

It might be more interesting to compare the unique word count of HP:MoR
against some of the "real" Harry Potter books, if you can get your hands on
the text.

~~~
Robin_Message
Thanks to the internet†, I can reveal a surprise: with the same methodology,
the dictionary words in the seven real Harry Potter books concatenated is
19,245 and the total unique words is 21,441.

Total word count is 1,122,131 which is longer than HP:MoR by a factor of
three. Plotting mean unique word count for the whole, halves and quarters of
MoR gives a fit of uniques=168*length^0.3357, which makes sense given Zipf's
law. That formula predicts about 18,050 words for a work of the same length as
the original HP.

(Edit to add obvious test in the other direction.) The first 386,829 words of
the original HP contain 12,255 unique words. The last 386,829 words contain
13,635 uniques. So, its comparable but perhaps slightly more varied (MoR had
12,685).

In light of those figures, is it possible Eliezer's vocabulary is less good
than he thinks (Dunning-Kruger)? Especially as the Harry Potter book were
written for children and presumably edited as such.

On the other hand, the fact that Eliezer seems to have used fewer words in his
writing than you'd expect if his vocab was excellent doesn't mean that his
known vocab is poor — he might just not use all the words he knows in writing.

Additionally, given the success of J K Rowling as an author, you might expect
her vocabulary to be excellent, so it is conceivable that he's good and she's
better.

† I have all the Harry Potter books on a shelf at home. Is torrenting the pdfs
at work so I can word count them infringing copyright? I could have done it
manually, it just would have taken longer.

~~~
khafra
I thought Eliezer's Lesswrong sequences might give different results. Applying
your tests to those (from <http://jb55.com/lesswrong/>), I get 257,646 total
words, 11,666 unique dictionary words, and 12,721 unique words (I'm surprised
there aren't more unique words, given that the quantum physics sequence is in
there). 168*257,646^.3357 = 11,010, so the sequences seem to be at about HP
level.

Excellent work, by the way; thanks for the analysis.

------
KirinDave
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.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.

------
natural219
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
_my age group_ , let alone the general populace (I'm 20).

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.

~~~
marcinw
I must admit, as an American male, a little older than you, my score was also
so low, I'm too embarrassed to even mention. All those years of cheating on
vocabulary tests (merely by memorizing the words 5 minutes prior to taking the
test) in high school did not help. It's one of the those things I look back on
in life and regret. Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to _catch up_ ?

edit: forgot to mention, while I am a native English speaker, both my parents
tend to speak Polish most of the time, while I always reply in English. I have
to wonder how much this had an affect on me.

~~~
georgieporgie
Read a lot. In fact, buy a Kindle and read a lot. It has a built-in dictionary
which is quite decent, and you'll actually look up words that you would
otherwise skim past with a mediocre context-based understanding.

------
apl
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.

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.

Unless they somehow control for domain specificity and atypical acquisition,
let's not get too frustrated. ( _Disclaimer_ : Not a native speaker -- result
around median.)

~~~
crazygringo
Hi, creator of the site here -- I worked for several years teaching English to
foreigners, and my own (informal) statistical research has found that native
and non-native language acquisition, while certainly somewhat different, is
not tremendously different. I've run this test on Americans and Brazilians at
all different levels, and the size of the progression from known to unknown
words is rather consistent.

That being said, cognates between languages can give an artificially inflated
score. I intentionally avoided any words with the same roots in English and
Portuguese (my second language), which should hopefully also be true for most
Romance languages. This way, you shouldn't be able to "guess" meanings you've
never actually learned. However, it wouldn't surprise me if German speakers,
for example, were able to "guess" an additional number of words correctly.

Also, the 60-80 words are only what _you_ are tested on -- the word selection
on pages 2-4 changes depending on your answers on the first page, so it
attempts to narrow down your vocab knowledge "at the margin".

~~~
pygy_
There were around 10 french words in the list I got. Maybe more, maybe less, I
didn't count exactly.

------
mike_esspe
Their statistic is probably inflated due to linguistic subreddit, where this
test originated:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_created_this_site_to_measure_the_size_of/)

------
joeyh
"Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning
you aren't exactly sure of."

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.

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?

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.

~~~
jonnathanson
Something often missing from vocabulary tests -- and arguably more impressive
than raw, crystallized vocab -- is the ability to deduce the meaning of new
words on the fly, whether from context or absent any context (in which case,
the meaning is ascertained from roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc.). I'd love to
see a test of this skill. For instance, I doubt many people encounter the word
"reck" in their daily lives. But I'd give props to someone whose brain would
quickly draw the connection to the more frequently seen "reckless," thereby
deducing that the word had something to do with caution or concern.

Similarly, your point has some validity. Most of the time, we don't acquire
language through reading the dictionary; we acquire it primarily through
context in the course of reading or conversation. This is why, when pressed to
define words, we'll often reach for a string of synonyms, or else provide
usage in sample sentences. I bet few people here, let alone anywhere, could
render dictionary-acceptable definitions of 99% of the words they know.

(On the flipside, this is also why we forget most of the words we crammed in
preparation for the SAT back in the day; we learned them completely out of
context and in an artificial way).

------
diN0bot
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.

~~~
johnfn
I got just under the median on this test, but I scored around the 99th
percentile in the SAT verbal, and I feel it's reasonable to say the two test
approximately the same things. It seems unlikely that I've slipped so far in
just two years :)

I never really considered Hacker News to be full of overconfident people. If
anything, to me being part of HN is a humbling experience. It reminds me that
there are so many people out there that are smarter or more experienced than
me, and I've seen other people say similar things.

~~~
onan_barbarian
Hacker News is _very_ full of over-confident people, believe me.

During a discussion of 'whether open source contributions were being overly
important to job seekers' a while back, a surprising number of HN commenters
automatically put themselves in the role of employer, peering dubiously over
their glasses at me. Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified
to be taking on that kind of role with respect to anyone.

I don't think SAT verbal is nearly as intensely focused on obscure vocab. I
didn't do it, but did do a GRE verbal back in 1994 to get into grad school.
For what it's worth, my score on this and my GRE verbal were quite consistent.

~~~
astrofinch
"Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified to be taking on
that kind of role with respect to anyone."

You inferred this based on user profiles?

~~~
onan_barbarian
Correct. Most of the folks in question had filled in enough to be able to be
straightforwardly findable in terms of linkedin, blogs, etc. It wasn't rocket
science.

------
mdda
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).

~~~
crazygringo
Site creator here -- you're right, there's no cheating detection. I ask people
not to fill out the survey results if they're not being entirely truthful, of
course they are free to disregard the instructions.

But I created the site, less interested in _absolute_ vocabulary size numbers
(these vary widely depending upon methodology), and more in _relative_ changes
among age groups, SAT scores, etc. And hopefully, cheating would not be
correlated to any of those...

But at the end of the day, this is not a controlled, scientific survey. It is
a voluntary quiz, though I am doing my best to control for other factors.

~~~
bermanoid
I'm really, _really_ hoping that you're logging referrer data along with
scores - if you're not already, you might consider starting. Even if this is
not a source of proper scientific data, it would be highly interesting to see
how, for instance, the Reddit referrals do vs. HN vs. Facebook, etc. We can
probably all make some fairly accurate guesses about where the high and low
performers would come from, but I'd be real curious to see the exact
breakdowns.

------
mdda
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.

~~~
dorian-graph
I wouldn't say the ONLY people. This could be the next 'IQ test' where it
seems the near opposite, the lesser intelligent ones are who are obsessed with
them.

Going by magazines, common forwards and so on it seems the average man loves a
good self-quiz.

~~~
mdda
But to remove some of the bias, we'd need approximately equal numbers of above
and below average people to be going to the trouble of answering the quiz.

And in the back of my mind, I thought that the bulk of quiz magazines were
sold to women, no? (Though I'm probably being too pedantic...)

~~~
meric
It could be only either very below average and very above average people are
interested in self-quizzes, too, so equal numbers alone won't be enough.

------
lliiffee
They ought to include some fake but plausible words to correct for cheaters.
(Perhaps they do?)

~~~
jamesbritt
Some of those words had a definite brillig quality.

~~~
rdl
Yet, are rather cromulent

ObScore: 36000, 32yo male US-english native speaker. There were a few more I'd
seen but wasn't really sure enough to define. I maxed out the SAT verbal
section (and got 1 wrong on math, which was enough to drop to 780/800) back in
the 1990s.

------
NnamdiJr
Don't care too much for percentile and age stats at the end.. clearly doesn't
represent general pop.

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 _fluency_ 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.

Would love to have something like this to quickly gauge my vocab in other
languages!

~~~
dennisgorelik
I agree: the test seems to correctly estimate vocabulary size, but is
incorrect in calculating percentile.

I got 12900 (English is my second language) and it seems to be about accurate.
I also feel that I'm fluent in English, and it confirms that 10000 words is
sufficient for fluency.

The test is also missing professional lingo: where are such words as SQL,
lisp, ai, startup, PG, HN and other that we all know so well?

------
mortenjorck
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."

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?

~~~
StavrosK
Phallometry is nice when you have the big phallus.

~~~
mkr-hn
Unless it's being used by a dystopian regime to decide who poses the greatest
threat to the oligarchs.

~~~
kragen
Maui, clearly.

People who lead revolutions tend not to be very humble, from what I can glean
from history. So what you're suggesting might work.

------
onan_barbarian
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.

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.

My 3rd grade son got 10200, and enjoyed discussing the words he didn't get. I
think every 3rd grader should know "mawkish". :-)

------
matwood
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.

Memorizing trivia words is just something that has never interested me.
Instead I keep a thesaurus and dictionary handy at all times :)

------
coolestuk
<http://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953>

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).

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.

------
codex
The population is self selecting; I wouldn't trust their percentiles.

~~~
eli
Not just self selecting, but the scores are basically self-reported. It didn't
actually test anything.

------
Jach
I got 28,800 <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38317> So apparently I should be 31
instead of almost 21.

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.

Anyway, I think this exchange kind of tipped me over the edge to stop caring.
(Of course that's led to forgetting a lot.)

William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word
that might send a reader to the dictionary."

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."

Of course, having some background in French and Latin probably helps for
inferring a few words.

------
fhars
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).

~~~
gimpf
So you have used up nearly 70% of your vocabulary to write this comment? I
have to admit, your proficiency in English grammar is extraordinary given
this.

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, no, he just learnt barely enough words to make that comment and a few
similar ones. Quite frugal, really.

------
fiesycal
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 <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36208>

------
lostmypw
"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."

Coincidentally, I just happened to come across this quote in Peter Norvig's
"Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming".

------
Mindful
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.

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!

------
toot
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!)

~~~
deadmansshoes
I felt the same. Also there were some words I thought I knew what they meant,
but my definition would only be partially correct.

Also some definitions you can guess at - do these count as part of your
vocabulary or not? E.g. Clerisy, can be easily deduced to be the class of
clerics, but not sure if I'd be able to say if it was a real word or not.

------
virtualritz
I am a non-native speaker (NNS) and got 15.700.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is
> severely skewed_

You clearly have a very good vocabulary IMO. However, if I may, I think it
should be "pertaining _to_ certain subjects". It can be used without the "to"
but sounds a bit conceited to this native speakers ear.

For example see
[http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&...](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&SearchBy=4&Word=pertaining).
All the literature examples written out use "pertaining to" in some form:
"pertaining thereto", "pertaining only to", "to them pertaining", _et cetera_.

------
Mithrandir
Very interesting. The details on how it works are here:
<http://testyourvocab.com/details.php>

(My result:) <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35795>

~~~
copper
Perhaps the most interesting part of how they're doing it is that they have an
algorithm that doesn't rely on the results of other test takers, except for
the eventual statistics.

Also worth seeing: <http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php>

------
sanxiyn
Learning to program did help. I could check "shard" and "bloat", which are
apparently quite rare in general context compared to words I know.

How about you? Were there words you could check because you encountered it
often in programming context?

------
olegp
"The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full
entries for 171,476 words in current use"

~~~
kragen
It's interesting and humbling to contemplate that I know only about 20% of the
words in my native language.

------
crazygringo
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!

Thanks for all the participation, and comments -- I didn't submit this myself,
so thanks, mike_esspe.

I've responded to a few points down below; there's a lot more info on the
details of the test at:

<http://testyourvocab.com/faq.php> <http://testyourvocab.com/details.php>

~~~
rweba
Hi crazygringo,

I was intrigued by your estimation procedure and was thinking of a way of
playing around with it:

(1) Create a random bit vector of size 45,000. (2) Pick 40 positions in the
vector at random and use those positions to estimate the proportion of ones in
the original bit vector (so far this is easy). (3) Select an additional 120
positions and use the more sophisticated procedure to refine the estimate from
part (2).

I was wondering if you have code or pseudo-code for how you implemented
part(3) specifically how you choose the 120 words for extra testing. It seems
there are a lot of different natural ways you can do it. Did you write an
academic paper about this?

Thanks!

------
tep
13700 German, 22 years old

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.

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.

Another thing is that my sentences are almost always way too long.

As someone else pointed out before: I don't want my former English teacher to
read this, either.

------
blntechie
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.

Edit: And, also to add, I followed 2 criteria for whether I know the word or
not.

1\. What's the absolute definition?

2\. And can I find the equivalent or meaning of it in my native language?
(which is Tamil, an Indian language, if anyone cares.)

~~~
autarch
I think a lot of the words are ones that you will _only_ ever encounter in
reading fiction (and flower/older fiction at that). Also, keep in mind that
this test doesn't include field-specific technical jargon.

------
Pistos2
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.

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.

------
lawlit
"Is English your first (native) language, or a second (non-native) language?"
my english is actually my 3rd non-native language :)

------
Cyph0n
It seems to be fairly accurate. Maybe it isn't. My score:
<http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822>

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.

~~~
nolite
Methinks these survey takers doth be liars

~~~
Cyph0n
Bingo.

------
johnsonjohnson
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.

Now with a low score of 17500 I wonder, if it isn't enough to completely
endulge oneself in the language, what is?

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.

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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=endulge>

Sorry, couldn't resist. For a minute I thought I'd missed out on an alternate
spelling. Then I realised that was unpossible ;0)>

~~~
johnsonjohnson
Too bad, I'm not from Ohio. But this proves my point. Improve spelling?
Increase vocabulary? It seems that swimming in the language isn't enough.

------
pacaro
39,000 I use more of the words on page 2 that I should, I'm probably
unbearably obnoxious to be around...

------
Troll_Whisperer
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.

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),

~~~
kragen
What your friend's dictionary contains a hundred and fifty thousand of are
almost certainly not the same thing that the OED contains only a hundred and
seventy thousand of. Take a look at a random OED page sometime and see how
many words you don't know.

------
Terretta
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.

42,500 (<http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216>)

Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...

~~~
schleyfox
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." -- Dorothy Parker

~~~
angus77
That was one of Dave Sim's favourite lines. I think he thinks he made it up
himself, though.

------
lawn
I'm a non-native speaker and I fare pretty well with reading stuff but I'm a
bit chocked at my result (< 19k).

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.

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.

------
sgt
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.

------
schleyfox
37,700 <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36826> without cheating and not counting
ones that I only thought I could puzzle out.

Maybe working on that English Minor is panning out...

------
cduan
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.

~~~
swehner
At <http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample> they explain how they
chose the words the test is based on:

Quote:

Too limited. Words that are specifically American or British (in meaning or
spelling), or slang, or scientific/medical, or anything labeled archaic, or
anything else that isn't part of broad, general English. Also, no animals or
ingredients, which depend too much on where you live.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _or anything else that isn't part of broad, general English_

So scientific words aren't general English? This suggests that the authors
don't think anyone ever talks about science?

------
Mvandenbergh
I'm guessing they selected words from a large corpus of written English based
on their relative frequency.

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

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.

------
Detrus
22,700 <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38336>

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.

------
kurumo
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.

------
antirez
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, ...).

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.

~~~
spreiti
7830 here. (Swiss-German native speaker) Like you I don't have enough exposure
to other domains outside of programming and technology.

------
wolfrom
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.

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.

~~~
dspace
> I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words.

This is what I was thinking. I scored 34K, and _rarely_ encounter a word that
I don't understand in regular speech or reading. I also know several thousand
jargon words, none of which were on that test. I know what I need to know.
Memorizing another 16K words to reach Shakespeare's magical 50K (and feel good
about myself) would be a waste of precious mental resources.

~~~
angus77
As someone else pointed out here, Shakespeare's vocab was just over 30k (which
was the number I was familiar with).

------
jamesbkel
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.

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.

------
sanxiyn
12,900: <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=39955>

I am not a native speaker and I was happy to get more than >10,000, really.

------
6ren
Most interesting to me were the words I recognized, but weren't sure of their
meaning (e.g. malapropism, which turned out to mean _ludicrous misuse of a
word_ ).

BTW: a nice thing about online dictionaries is they have sound files for
pronunciation. e.g. <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/malapropism> With a
plugin, you can highlight and right-click to open in another tab.

------
JoeAltmaier
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?

32800

------
bliss
If you found this test engaging, then it might be time to give this a go
again... <http://freerice.com/>

------
hristov
Pretty interesting, but I do hope they do not try to extract any meaningful
statistics based on this. I guarantee you 95% of the people are cheating.

------
beseku
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.

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...

------
maurycy
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.

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.)

------
angus77
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.

------
scscsc
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.

According to <http://math.ucdenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/shakespeare.html>,
Shakespeare used ~32K words in all of his works.

------
gibybo
I got 17,200. I'm 22 with a Bachelor's degree and I was pretty surprised with
how low I scored. Anyone in a similar category?

~~~
lzm
18,100 words, 24 years old, non-native speaker. I've never read a fiction book
in English, only technical ones.

------
sandstrom
14,000; though English isn't my vernacular. Reading more English fiction seem
to be a recurring suggestion, guess I should!

~~~
fedd
to read your post i looked up the word 'vernacular' in the dictionary

------
auganov
I got to be in the 1st percentile :-). But well, considering that I have never
read a book in my life I guess it figures.

------
dmazin
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.

------
Toucan
43,300. I strongly suspect learning Latin and Greek at school helped more than
a little with this particular test.

~~~
swehner
At <http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample> they hint at omitting a
lot of Latin words:

Quote:

No cognates or false-friends with Portuguese. This probably knocks out at
least half the dictionary, since Romance languages have plenty in common with
English. False friends need to be avoided as well, since a Brazilian beginner
will see "pretend" and assume he knows it means pretender, which actually
means "intend." Interestingly, the no-Portuguese rule leaves the test with a
strongly pronounced short Anglo-Saxon flavor.

~~~
gjm11
Even so, many of the most obscure words are potentially guessable by someone
with a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. Funambulist, opsimath, hypnopompic.
I don't think a classical education will be much help with cantles and
williwaws, though.

------
shii
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.

[1] <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36123>

------
parfe
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"

------
lucian1900
I only got 23k, I'm quite humbled. English is my second language and I'd hoped
to have mastered it by now.

------
thret
40,300 and I am astounded that there were words I hadn't seen before.

Funambulism is my new favourite word.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I wonder if any that got it did so because they recognised the word from prior
usage? Or instead did they recognise the Latin form and guess it.

By rights a funambulist should be a John Cleese impersonator ...

------
gabebw
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.

Anyway, my score: <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192>

~~~
ojbyrne
The word was actually "sparge," a word that any home-brewers have likely come
across.

~~~
gabebw
Ah, that's why dictionary.com didn't know what "splarge" meant. Apparently
"sparge" is a sprinkling - why would home brewers know this? Genuinely curious
here.

~~~
ojbyrne
<http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Batch_Sparging>

------
martingordon
I'm almost 26 and I scored 26,500.

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.

~~~
crazygringo
Site creator here -- That has been the most interesting finding so far -- I
certainly didn't expect it. Unfortunately I haven't had enough participation
yet from children, or older folks :), to see how it continues to extend in
either direction.

------
KevBurnsJr
Your sample is heavily skewed toward the literate.

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.

------
jacis
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.

------
diN0bot
anyone know of something like this for other languages, eg german?

~~~
swehner
Actually they have a link at <http://testyourvocab.com/about.php>:

"The companion Brazilian project can be found at howmanywords.com.br"

Which right now just says "Calcule o tamanho do seu vocabulário em inglês /
Coming soon"

~~~
kragen
I will be a _lot_ more interested in the Brazilian site when it goes live! I'm
not making any particular effort to expand my English vocabulary (having a
smaller vocabulary is not among the top ten reasons my writing in English is
worse than Shakespeare's) but my Portuguese vocabulary is _muito terrivel_. It
would be great to have a way to measure my progress.

Edit: Oh. The Brazilian site is just a Portuguese version of the instructions
for the English site? :(

------
burgerbrain
22,000

Clearly my American public school education has served me well. >_<

~~~
davidw
No one getting high scores did so because of or despite their education. They
did it by having the sort of brain that happens to retains words like
uxoricide and reading copious quantities of material in which such abstruse
words are employed.

I got a high score and went to public schools in the US, and didn't finish
college either.

~~~
burgerbrain
A proper (classical) education is generally widely accepted to have a dramatic
positive influence on ones vocabulary.

~~~
davidw
At one point, the sun was generally widely accepted to revolve around the
earth.

It's likely that education improves one's vocabulary, however there are a lot
of variables there. People who go to good schools likely come from families
where learning is important in any case, are wealthier, etc...

------
tommyudo
I took the opposite approach.

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.

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.

From this, I deduced that my total vocabulary size was all the words ever
known to any English speaker anywhere, anytime - minus 20.

This made me very pleased with myself, even though I knew my assumptions were
pretty terrible.

(Interesting that the spell check in my browser doesn't recognize vibrissae.)

------
mcphilip
lampoon: verb: Publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule or
sarcasm.

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?

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.

------
ahrens
I got 19 800. As a Swedish non-native speaker I thought it was OK. The test
needs to also show the averages for non-natives and natives separate.

------
codabrink
It appears that this is accurate within 4 or 5 thousand words.. I've taken the
test a few times, and my results are relatively distanced..

------
derrida
I was honest and was shocked by my result being in the bottom third! I have an
IQ > 125! I think I need to read more.

~~~
jtheory
Self-selected survey respondents != actual population.

Though I suppose, also -- IQ doesn't say much at all about what your
vocabulary will be. If you don't read much, or mostly read popular literature,
it doesn't matter how clever your are; your vocabulary won't be any bigger
than the words you've encountered enough to form (or look up) a definition.

Though it's also worth noting that beyond a certain point, building a broader
vocabulary isn't very useful; when you communicate, you generally need to
limit yourself to vocabulary your audience knows. Likewise, when you're
reading, it's pretty common that the authors using particularly obscure
vocabulary are using it to muddy their meaning, not clarify it.

------
badclient
Non-natives who have studied English intently may well score higher than
natives on a strictly vocab test like this.

------
qusiba
Oh, I got only 16900. I think I will do the test again each year to see if I'm
improving.

------
kunjaan
Finally some use of the GRE English exam that I had to take before joining CS
program!

------
gary4gar
14,000 Words

I am non-native speaker. I guess that's a excuse for such poor score. Need to
improve :(

------
etfb
I'm a native speaker, and I got a server error. Does that mean I'm illiterate?

------
mkr-hn
23,700

27 year old native speaker in the US. I talk good English. I even properize
capital nouns.

------
homemadejam
My score was 10,700. Not too bad considering I'm dyslexic right?.... Right? :|

------
Timmy_C
I think I did really poorly. My score was around 21,000.

~~~
jb3
I was about the same. I was surprised when I saw the percentiles and averages
at the end.

~~~
eli
The numbers appear to be based on people who previously completed the test.
It's a pretty easy test to cheat on...

------
bitanarch
20,700, Hong Kong Chinese living in the Bay Area.

------
evilswan
Too much clicking.

~~~
ars
Use tab and space instead.

------
tlammens
OK, time to read that dictionary book again.

------
fedd
i understand why i can't read Alexia Tsotsis articles on Techcrunch without a
dictionary, with my shameful 8,560 vocab

------
astrofinch
Vocabulary is trivia...

------
georgieporgie
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. :-)

------
4J7z0Fgt63dTZbs
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

I could use some help boosting my vocabulary...

~~~
onan_barbarian
If you've been learning words from the "Klan Academy" you should be very
careful when you first address an African-American.

------
derleth
38,800 here.

------
taliesinb
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.

------
zoowar
Just a survey in disguise. Anyway, here's my score
<http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35380>

~~~
LukeFitz
It's certainly a survey, but I don't know if it's in disguise...

~~~
xtal
And it was optional...

