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Test your vocabulary

That was pretty cool! My estimated vocabulary = 27300 words

Seems around average for a native English speaker at my age (33).
 
The only way to do a test like this with any sort of accuracy, is to force people to use each word in a cogent sentence on the spot.

Then you would see the test scores drop dramatically.
 
I got around 18300 words. I'm a 21-year-old non-native English speaker. Also studying for a BA in English.

Cyc: This type of test (test your vocab) obviously does not provide us with the most substantial of results. Regarding your imagined experiment: do you think it's possible to consider a given word to be part of a person's vocabulary even if they cannot form a cogent sentence with it? Is a passive/active vocabulary distinction viable?
 
lulzkiller said:
I got around 18300 words. I'm a 21-year-old non-native English speaker. Also studying for a BA in English.

Cyc: This type of test (test your vocab) obviously does not provide us with the most substantial of results. Regarding your imagined experiment: do you think it's possible to consider a given word to be part of a person's vocabulary even if they cannot form a cogent sentence with it? Is a passive/active vocabulary distinction viable?
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Standard vocabulary tests are multiple choice for a reason. It forces you to recognize the word and find a synonym or definition. This test is a series of check boxes.

The test specifically instructed people not to count the word unless you could recognize it definitively. Also, if you read the story after the survey, they point out that the average for the test is remarkably higher than national averages. This leads me to believe that people are counting words that they recognize but cannot quite place. This, despite the test instructing them not to, and resulting in a score inflation.

At best, this is a test to see how honest people are when self-evaluating. For the record, I believe that you are being honest.
 
Thank you! I read some of the stuff they wrote about the results as well. If I recall correctly, they also attribute the extremely high scores to uneven socioeconomic distribution of participants and other similar factors. (I read about the website on either languagehat.com or Language Log. I'd wager that most of their readership would easily belong to the 98th percentile - lawyers, linguists, literary editors, other academics etc.)
 
Only 15,600 words?

If I wasn't completely sure about the definition of a word I didn't select it. I was "pretty sure" about many of them though :)

According to their preliminary findings, a native speaking 11 year old has a larger vocabulary than me. 8)
 
^ I wouldn't take it too seriously. As I said earlier, I think that this test suffers from some major score inflation.
 
I'm a 29-year-old non-native speaker from Finland. I was surprised that I only got a score of 11700 words... When I was in high school, my English teacher said that no one in my school was as good at English as me. Also the guys at my workplace(university physics department) often need my help in translating something.

I tried to be honest in the test, choosing only the words I could use in a real sentence.

I also took the SAT vocabulary test, which is multiple choice, and scored 78 out of 100.
 
Thing is, I think your score gets mangled quite hard if you haven't read a lot of literature and been able to remember the unusual words. I only checked one or two boxes on the last page.
 
i was a bit perturbed with myself as i only got a 25,000 after seeing the average is 20-35. i was sure to be completely honest with myself and if unable to voice a definition, i at least used it in a quick sentence in my little head. hopefully Cyc is correct, and most people are allowing their ego to inflate the scores a bit. that's what i will tell myself :D i would love to post this on facebook, but this will end up being a massive dicksizing contest with my arrogant associates.
 
30,000 here, and totally honest.

TestYourVocab.com is part of an independent American-Brazilian research project
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what? looks more like a 'how much Charles Dickens books have you read' test.
 
DarthMom said:
i was a bit perturbed with myself as i only got a 25,000 after seeing the average is 20-35. i was sure to be completely honest with myself and if unable to voice a definition, i at least used it in a quick sentence in my little head. hopefully Cyc is correct, and most people are allowing their ego to inflate the scores a bit. that's what i will tell myself :D i would love to post this on facebook, but this will end up being a massive dicksizing contest with my arrogant associates.
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I posted this on FB, and believe it or not, with over 100 friends, only 1 person bothered posting their results.

So either nobody checks my wall, or people who took it weren't very proud of their score.
 
20,200 pts. 21yrs, Foreign student. Pretty good if average for foreign learners is 2,500-9000pts. But I speak english pretty much everyday anyways since many of my friends cant speak my native language.
 
I think I got just over 25000. I'm ok with this. It would be nice to know more, but a lot of the words in the test aren't things you would see in any book that I would ever read, and I'm not just reading "pop" books either. All of the significant books from significant authors (mostly scifi and fantasy, mind you) that I've read would never use a word like "imbroglio".

I wonder where someone is supposed to learn more than that without reading older "pieces of literature" as a hobby.
 
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