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

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

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

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

Pretty fun.

I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow.

Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.

Got 59,800, Performance Breakdown:

Core Basics 19/20

Intermediate 17/20

Advanced 19/20

Expert 14/20

Grandmaster 12/20

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

Minor feedback:

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

a. it makes guessing too easy

b. it basically becomes a circular definition which is meaningless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is rather like SAT from 35 years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also adequate options, that sound plausible.

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

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

UX suggestion to make going thought this much faster:

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

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

3. Once submitted, another Enter brings the next one

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

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

It's hilarious that most of these words are French

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You mastered 98 new words! THE VERDICT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool idea, am working through.

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

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

Also who is Sandi?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are many more like this.

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

I weep for the world that is to come.

This was fun! The progression seems logical.

I scored 71,000.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise :D

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

The four options were generally:

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

Which massively reduces the difficulty

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

Fun!

why use many word when few word do trick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The triple click is annoying.

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

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

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

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

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

I was doing well until I got to grandmaster.

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

Cool concept. but...

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

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

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

67900

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

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

I use the language to understand not get an effect

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

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