Your English vocabulary

[Prannon]

It's my first language and I have a college degree, and still only got 25000 or so words on the second try at the test. I feel so ashamed... *hides in a closet and compulsively eats chips and dip*

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

39,900. Not bad.

[Ægen]

38,200. I feel like an idiot, should be able to figure some of them out.

[RazorOutlaw]

What? The website said those with English as a first language had a vocabulary of anywhere between 20,000 - 30,000. You're past that. Way, way past that.

[Rabid]

28,800 words.

My god. I think I broke the test !


Honestly, I was expecting something like 10,000-12,000 , not this ludicrously high numb... wait... how exactly do they count/partake their words ? *suspicious*

[Rabid]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking/expecting as well, but, still... What I'm curious about is how they differentiate between words that have the same "roots" (I don't know you'd say). They say :

This number does not include word derivations (e.g. "quickly," derived from "quick," does not count as a separate word). And while it does count compound words (like "air conditioning"), it does not include phrases or expressions (like "food for thought").

This is rather vague...

[Serafina]

They also have a nice chart of average words known by age. You're WAY higher than the peak on that chart, which is somewhere around 33000.

[Vanas]

35800 here. I didn't put much thought into it and just scooted through which I sense may be the idea. If you've got to think about and derive the word, I'm guessing you probably don't know it as part of your vocabulary. Yet.

Oh, and it's my first language. More than 10k above the average for my age, as well.

[Rabid]

They also have a nice chart of average words known by age. You're WAY higher than the peak on that chart, which is somewhere around 33000.

Mang. Statistically speaking, this test implies that my vocabulary is a bit larger than the one of a native speaker my age (21). Feels weird...


EDIT : However, some of the words in this test are french-derived, so...

[Hawkwings]

I got about 25,000, and I'm a native English speaker.

I didn't put much thought into it and just scooted through which I sense may be the idea.

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

If I just breeze through then I get something like 34,000 words. If I'm scrupulously honest then my score goes down significantly.

[Stofsk]

Yeah there were a few words in there I had seen before but couldn't remember what the definition was, so I didn't check it.

I am also reasonably certain that many of these words were made up or at least sound like they were.

[loomer]

37,000. The last column has words that I didn't even think were words, like clerisy.

[Terralthra]

38k. Slightly disappointed.

[Napoleon the Clown]

29k, native speaker, 25, no college (I really should go, though).


If I'd gone to college instead of procrastinating it I'd expect my vocab would be considerably higher than it is now. Really, though, reading comp is what I excel most at, as far as language is concerned.

[Tritio]

30,000 here. Compared to the charts, we all seem to score pretty high up.

[Big Orange]

I got a vocabulary of 33, 400 words and it's my first language. OK, I guess.

[CaptainChewbacca]

35,500 for me. I was at about 100% and then the last row of the second page blew me away. I object to people using greek and/or latin to deduce the definitions. The goal of the test was to check words for which you KNOW the definition, not those which you can reason out. For example 'Uxoricide', I could have broken it down (wife, to kill) but the truth is that I genuinely did not know the word existed until I saw it on the test. If you didn't know the word, it wasn't a part of your vocabulary.

And the test is to gauge words you 'know', not suspect, the definition of.

[AMT]

28,800. But then I only clicked the ones for words I knew the definitions of, not the ones where I thought I knew, or even had to consider about, going with the spirit of the survey.

Probably would have been higher if I'd put the maybes in there. Oh well, better than I'd thought I'd get.

[Marcus Aurelius]

28,800. But then I only clicked the ones for words I knew the definitions of, not the ones where I thought I knew, or even had to consider about, going with the spirit of the survey.

Probably would have been higher if I'd put the maybes in there. Oh well, better than I'd thought I'd get.

Using the same principle, 21,400. Including words I was fairly but not completely certain of I was able to raise that to 24,000. The fact I never studied French or Latin seems to hurt me quite a lot. German does not help a lot with English, since most of the common vocabulary is fairly ancient and something one has to learn anyways even for basic proficiency. I had 'leitmotiv' (which I knew) as a German loan among the about 20 more obscure words loaned from French, Latin or classic Greek.

English of course is my second language. I studied more German and Swedish than English in school, but I have used English much more in practice.

[Surlethe]

My penis is ... 28600 long. No Latin for six years hurt on the second half of the narrow vocab section.* (Maybe stopping and squinting at the word and running through roots in my head might have helped, but I guess that thinking hard about whether or not you know the definition defeats the point of the test.)

In fact, I think the only Latin-derived word I could figure out right away from roots was uxoricide.

Edit: My technical vocabulary is much larger! </sulk>

* Reading more, looks like the second half of the narrow vocab section is supposed to be words I don't know, so I wouldn't have gotten most of it anyway.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I would hope not many. Though typos and mistakes happen, I should hope nobody who scored that highly could confuse rein with reign or rain, nevermind using "loosed" instead of "lost".

I got 32,400. I was hoping I could do better than that, but still, not a terrible result. I think I'll look up some of the words I didn't know, just so I can expand my vocabulary further. Stuff like "Oneiromancy" isn't fair. I don't know Greek, damnit.

Edit: I feel stupid for not being able to figure out what "verdure" meant, with it being so simmilar to "verdant".

[Edi]

Well, 35,100 for me. Damn, I expected a bit higher than that, but can't complain. Second language for me.

I would hope not many. Though typos and mistakes happen, I should hope nobody who scored that highly could confuse rein with reign or rain, nevermind using "loosed" instead of "lost".

Regarding the rein/reign/rain, I would actually put forth that most people here who scored over 30k on that test are more likely than not to confuse reign and rein and sometimes even rain and reign. I had a massive rant about that particular pet peeve of mine years ago and I think I still have it saved somewhere. Even here, where people generally have good language skills, over 90% of the time they get that wrong.

[Big Orange]

I'm 26 years old and the average repertoire of words for that age group is 26, 537.

[Hawkwings]

I don't know what the reason is, but I've never been even slightly confused by rain/rein/reign and similar. What really annoys me is when people use "faze" wrong. For example, "Billy wasn't even phased by the sight of blood" or similar.

And yes, the point of the test is words that you know the definition of. Not words that you kinda-sorta know, not words that you can figure out, words that you know.