As a none native speaker (English would be my 3rd language at best, maybe 4th) I expected to dramatically underperform compared to most scores here, but:
You said yes to 76% of the existing words.
You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.
This gives you a corrected score of 76% - 0% = 76%.
As a native english speaker, answering only known words: 80% true positive, 0% false positive.
As a native english speaker, answering for known or plausible words (with empty profile to not contaminate the test): 96% true positive, 23% false positive.
German, 56 % true positive, 0 % false positive, could propably get about 90 % of the word non-word decisions right by guessing, the non-word are pretty non-English. There werde also a hand full of true-positives were I tended to think I know the meaning but decided to err on the other side because of the promised heavy penality.
I wonder how they take into account the kind of people who take a test like this are likely to have a good vocabulary. I suppose that might not be true but I don't think I'd do something similar for a test that measured something along the lines of matching faces to pop musicians.
The web lately did more for my dictionary than books, since I'm pretty much living on it while I'm getting my books in audio form. Audio helps with training to understand spoken language and improved the numbers of ‘read’ books a lot, but there's definitely the downside that unfamiliar words often fly by without impact.
problem I have with this test, is a slight dyslexia when hitting the appropriate key. Several times I knew I hit the wrong one a moment after, but had no way to go back and correct it.
Also, in some cases I noticed that there was what appeared to be a real word, but it was slightly misspelled, so I'm sure that counted as an incorrect input.
I didn't see how to estimate the size of your vocabulary, I just saw a percentage. Did I miss something? Like I want to know something like, based on your answers were estimate you know 8311 words.
I don't think this can be right. the Oxford English Dictionary has over 300,000 main words, and I got a score over 80%. That would suggest I have a vocabulary of 240,000 words, which seems a bit high, to say the least!
Their FAQ claims 60,000 ("The word list should contain almost all English words...") so 48k+ works known, which is somewhat more believable. OED 2nd Edition (1989) has 171k full, current entries [1] (and another 47k obsolete, which I will disregard), so 137k+ words, which is quite a few but perhaps not beyond the realm of imagination.
The ‘total count’ is in hundreds of thousands, especially since the test includes some specialized terms. A comprehensive dictionary is estimated to have over a million words, but that might include trivial variations.
Meanwhile, a native speaker's everyday dictionary is typically on the order of ten to twenty thousand words. No way that their ‘reserve’ knowledge extends twenty times beyond this. I'd guess maybe several thousand infrequent and specialized words, with which the total knowledge would still clock in at low tens of thousands.
I sometimes hit the "no" key before I even fully processed the word. In my experience this is a problem I frequently have with this kind of test where I'm presented with such choices in quick succession. After a while I tend to just choose before I started really thinking about it, and then realized I chose wrong.
87% with no false positives. In my view many of these are not what I consider English ‘words’ - plant names, trade marks and archaic words. Still fun though.
I wonder how tightly coupled this will be to education, gender, age, and especially handedness. Will righties rule and lefties drool, or will an unthinkable upset occur? I expect the U.K. to dominate because all the smart movies use U.K. actors, full of $2 words.
Hah, leftie here with the exact same score as you. I’m probably going to be thrown out from any statistics they derive as an outlier because I’m a high school dropout programmer who ravenously read books in his youth.
86% here with no false positives but with a four beer handicap and over 60yo but still "in the top level" (which has no definition). So I'll take this and skedaddle. Cheers :)
I got 80%, although I got penalized for "prostuttion" which I accepted by accident. I think it's a bit much to penalize people for accepting misspellings of real words. After all if someone wrote "In Germany prostuttion is legal" the meaning is perfectly clear.
I got two slightly misspelled words and it didn't mark them as wrong, so this whole test seems wildly inconsistent(not to mention it seems to have some foreign words and even names marked as real english words according to some other commenters...).
88% with 1 false positive, but it was 'wargish' which I think should be accepted as a real word.
To be fair, I did also hit yes for words that I could work out the greek/latin roots for.
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I know the intent of this test, but English has a special problem in that there is no real definition of what is and is not an English word. For example, there are a large number of words on this test that come directly from another language and are used as a term of art in a specific field.
See: mora, furuncle, cercal
Then you get transliterations like dacoit.
Are units of currency automatically English: piastre
Another genre is words that may be technically English, but would never be used - see delegable (delegatable would be used)
Then you have several alternate spellings from British English/American English/alternative transliterations.
I would consider "wargish" to be a word meaning "in the style of a warg", with warg being a word for wolf that appears in modern English works (Tolkien being the obvious one).
Agreed. If an author described a character to me as "wargish", I would instantly have an idea in my head of what that person looked like - ugly, brutish, and long-faced like a wolf. It should then I think, by extension, be classed as a word; or at least not be used in a test like this.
I felt smart having only missed 9 real words. Then I went to look them up. The definition for affricate made me feel real stupid again when I didn't understand almost every third word in the Google provided definition:
>a phoneme which combines a plosive with an immediately following fricative or spirant sharing the same place of articulation
I wouldn't feel bad...those (phoneme, plosive, fricative, spirant, and affricate) are specialized vocabulary words from a specific domain (linguistics). I only know them because I have an interest in the topic. Other than phoneme, they describe how words are pronounced and/or formed in the mouth.
Another linguistics enthusiast checking in. To expand on this, a “plosive” is a sound made with the tongue stopping the airflow and then releasing it (think “t”, “p”, “k” sounds), while a fricative involves continuous airflow (think “s”, “f”, and so on). What that definition is saying is that an “affricative” is a sound that combines two of these made with the tongue in the same position. In English, an example is the “t-ch” sound at the beginning of the word “chat”. Other languages have different examples, like the “t-s” sound written as ц in Russian.
There were words like "bate" and "earliness" that I figured could have worked and would be legal but considered they could have been made up. Still happy with 79% - 0% as native English ( well Aussie)
Going on intuition I figured that “boxthorn” and “razorbills” were undoubtedly English words but not knowing them I followed the rules and answered no. They both are, apparently, English words. 87%.
Part of the 96% comes, I think, from the fact that I did doctoral work in English lit, which gives me a better “feel” for those sorts of archaisms. I can’t say that I knew all of the words that cropped up in the test, but many of them sounded plausible on the basis of having read quite a bit of pre-19thC stuff.
This was a cute test, but it dinged me for not "knowing" the word "toreador". Except I do: it's a Spanish word, not an English one. I also don't consider it a loan word, because the English word for "toreador" is "bullfighter".
Took it once and was very conservative on words I didn’t “know”. Got 49% with no false positives. Upon inspection if I’d answered yes to everything I thought was a word, I’d have gotten much higher with no false positives. So I took it again and answered yes to everything I could guess the meaning of and got 89% with no false positives.
An example of something I said yes to on the second pass that I’d have said no to on the first: I guess superexcellent is a word, the meaning is very clear but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it used before and would never consider using it myself.
I had the inverse issue. I answered yes to too many non-words, despite the fact in hindsight they weren't weren't a word - but I thought they sounded correct enough that they could be used as a word.
Went back and also got a higher score by being less trigger happy with my right finger.
A lot of the time it's easy to guess what real words are based on what appear to be structured correctly. I scored much higher guessing (even though I had a couple of false positives) then when I answered truly.
Also a lot of the complex words are medicine/medical which makes sense since there are an awful lot of them but isn't necessraily representive of 73% (my score) of the words I will encounter outside of medical literature.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadMy score:
You said yes to 63% of the existing words.
You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.
This gives you a corrected score of 63% - 0% = 63%.
I already knew I wasn't a wordsmith so that's not awful. About what I expected.
You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.
This gives you a corrected score of 79% - 0% = 79%.
This is a high level for a native speaker.
I'm impressed, I thought I would score way less since I'm not a native speaker.
My brain small. Sad!
I'd bet there is a bias from those reporting scores here -- a humblebrag, for science, of course!
You said yes to 76% of the existing words.
You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.
This gives you a corrected score of 76% - 0% = 76%.
Which I find oddly high.
As a native english speaker, answering for known or plausible words (with empty profile to not contaminate the test): 96% true positive, 23% false positive.
PS: Right-handed
“Would you say you’ve read less than 10, less than 100, less than 1000, or all the books ever?”
I think it depends on the type of books one reads, not quantity.
Also, in some cases I noticed that there was what appeared to be a real word, but it was slightly misspelled, so I'm sure that counted as an incorrect input.
Edit: oops replied to wrong parent
[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are...
Meanwhile, a native speaker's everyday dictionary is typically on the order of ten to twenty thousand words. No way that their ‘reserve’ knowledge extends twenty times beyond this. I'd guess maybe several thousand infrequent and specialized words, with which the total knowledge would still clock in at low tens of thousands.
I wonder how tightly coupled this will be to education, gender, age, and especially handedness. Will righties rule and lefties drool, or will an unthinkable upset occur? I expect the U.K. to dominate because all the smart movies use U.K. actors, full of $2 words.
To be fair, I did also hit yes for words that I could work out the greek/latin roots for.
---
I know the intent of this test, but English has a special problem in that there is no real definition of what is and is not an English word. For example, there are a large number of words on this test that come directly from another language and are used as a term of art in a specific field.
See: mora, furuncle, cercal
Then you get transliterations like dacoit.
Are units of currency automatically English: piastre
Another genre is words that may be technically English, but would never be used - see delegable (delegatable would be used)
Then you have several alternate spellings from British English/American English/alternative transliterations.
>a phoneme which combines a plosive with an immediately following fricative or spirant sharing the same place of articulation
A number of those were intuition, though.
An example of something I said yes to on the second pass that I’d have said no to on the first: I guess superexcellent is a word, the meaning is very clear but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it used before and would never consider using it myself.
Went back and also got a higher score by being less trigger happy with my right finger.
I got 87-0 being strict and 93-17 by including "maybes", and I'm not sure which is more reasonable.
Validity is not sanity; just conjulate the worbs, I guess
Also a lot of the complex words are medicine/medical which makes sense since there are an awful lot of them but isn't necessraily representive of 73% (my score) of the words I will encounter outside of medical literature.