How many of the 170k English words do you know?

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Feature request: fewer clicks. It should be one click per question
  by fritzo
• It should be zero clicks
  by goodpoint
• another feature request: add a skip or "don't know" option. if i truly don't know a word then a lucky guess would inflate my score.
  by em-bee
• Keyboard shortcuts would be nice as well. When I saw it was 100 questions I bailed.
  by ortusdux
• I'd suggest a "toast" would suffice for the correct answers. Proceed to the next question when correct, with a "next" button when incorrect.
  by TheJoeMan
• 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.

  by dbingham
• Not that I want to cheat in such a game, but for many words everything but correct definition is shorter or follow some "dumb rpg text" template.

  Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.

  Like for me most of more complex words been adjectives with few nouns. And in many cases you can just see 2/4 or 3/4 definitions are not for adjective.

  by SXX
• I was actually kind of impressed with how many of them didn't fall into that trap, but where all the options were roughly the same length and format. (For sure, a couple of the others were BS.)
  by andrewflnr
• > Like if author used LLM to generate wrong definitions per word instead of actually mixing definitions of words.

  Yes, exactly like this.

  by margalabargala
• I feel like it make sense to just mix up definitions of different adjectives if it's adjective you looking at. With just little filtering to make sure you don't see repeatative definition options in different test words.
  by SXX
• 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.

  by vova_hn2
• I scored slightly better than you. I missed 3 expert and 8 grandmaster...

  It only pushed my score up to 65k.

  by firebot
• I also felt the definition of lethargic was kind of silly, especially since I had already gotten lethargy as a word in tier 1.
  by siegecraft
• 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
  by notsylver
• Hahahhaha i got 62k points by just choosing the longest definitions. Great observation!
  by thenthenthen
• Also surprisingly mostly the forst or last option (might be bias)
  by thenthenthen
• Usually there were two answers that sounded like the word If read by someone unfamiliar, those were short, then either one or two long versions.

  If one long versions you choose that, if two, then you choose the one that would be more useful to have a word assigned to it.

  by jwrallie
• These were likely all AI generated, or at least the alternatives were. I made an app a while ago as well, and afterwards realized AI often wanted to make a very covering answer for the correct one, making it often longer than the others, thus defeating the idea of the quiz in the process.
  by orrito
• > It seems like the right answer is usually the longest of the choices

  You are correct. I tested that hypothesis about a dozen times and it seems that if you always pick the longest you’ll get it right somewhere in the high 70s to mid 80s. For anyone interested in testing for themselves, open the website to the first question then run this in the console (not going to spend time optimising it, it works well enough for the purpose):

    let loopCount = 0
  
    const loop = setInterval(() => {
      Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).slice(0, 4).reduce((long, curr) => curr.textContent.length > long.textContent.length ? curr : long).click()
      setTimeout(() => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).at(-1).click(), 100)
      setTimeout(() => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("button")).at(-1).click(), 200)
  
      loopCount++
      if (loopCount === 100) clearInterval(loop)
    }, 500)

  by latexr
• 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.

  by nickcw
• Neat way to validate.

  Your method of sampling could be improved further, unfortunately at the expense of ease of use. If the dictionary was sorted according to difficulty, then you could use stratified sampling.

  I comment on the related aspects here.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599769

  by srean
• can't assume gaussian underlying distribution of the word-knowing, it's known zipfian. so you can't be doing anovas or anything of that nature because if you look up zipfian distribution's variance, you get Nature and Reality giving you the middle finger
  by curuinor
• I also got something around 70-80k with 95/100 correct words (I don't know or use most of these words, but the later sections have a lot of words with Greek or Latin origin, which made them easy to guess). One of my wrong words was a misclick in the first section, which I think dragged down the estimate quite a lot. You may have done something similar. I assume they use a simple formula where early misses cost you a lot and late misses cost you very little.
  by pclmulqdq
• It should be possible to respond "I don't know". When you really-really don't know, it's unfair to get a 1/4 chance at right anyway, or even better if you use routine multiple-choice tactics.

  I got credit for a few that I would have happily just missed.

  by rout39574
• It's probably more meaningful to force a guess, since you may guess on the basis of word elements that you do know. At worst, it's possible to compensate for a 25% chance of getting the right word by chance.
  by tengwar2
• Yeah it would just be easier and faster to have a Yes/No selection for each word and you just say whether you know the definition or not. That way you can blaze through all 100. Having keyboard shortcuts for each selection would help.
  by e1ghtSpace
• Agreed, there were also a few where I deduced the correct definition by comparing the options.
  by supermdguy
• Agreed

  I did the full 100. It's not even 1/4, with the harder ones when one description is significantly longer than others, it's the correct one. Even outside that 2 choices are usually some object - which I think is never the correct answer

  I'd also say the toughness should be mixed up a little. The last 30 or so became a slog

  Cool idea though!

  by dktp
• It is quite easy to cheese the problems: many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back"), many problem have this "correct answer + opposite meaning + 2 unrelated things" answer structure, and for the second half of the answers, very often the longest answer is the correct one. The wrong options are not well designed here.

  The sample of words is also heavily biased towards concepts relating to words, speech, speakers, and/or persuation. They are likely generated by an LLM which is primed on the task of choosing words, and end up choosing words related to "words".

  For context, I'm an L2 speaker, linguistic nerd, and I use English mostly in academic/professional settings. I got 75,400 by a combination of the tactics above; in reality it might be closer to 10-15k.

  The design is also painfully similar to Duolingo if anyone can spot that.

  by EtaoinWu
• >The design is also painfully similar to Duolingo if anyone can spot that.

  Yeah. Clocked it from the landing page.

  by da_grift_shift