New, better(?) vocabulary test

I have to admit, my score would be much much lower if I had not spent six months swotting for TOEFL at some point.

 

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A vocabulary of Standard words much over 30,000 isn't of great use.
While it's handy to know the word "Tenebrous" just in case someone else uses it, you could rarely use it unless you were being deliberately tenebrous.
No-one would know what the hell you were talking about.

 

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now
the higher scores posted here..
would those extensive vocabs be evident in one's posts?
these forums do afford the opportunity for utility since we talk about everything imaginable

for instance...arfa
he has the highest score
yet the dialogue is.......commonplace at best

then take quad
a high score actually supported by his rhetoric

someone validate please
capt?

 

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

you violate the spirit of the test

 

I'll only say that I've always managed to do rather embarassingly well in vocabulary and reading tests, since I was about 6 or 7.

But I'm just talking it up here, you realise.

And I went back and unchecked a few words from the last column, because I wasn't really sure what they meant. But my score with only about 4 or 5 words left checked in the last column was still 39,000. What gives?

I thought the test was too easy, btw.

 

Absent some data on the variance of the test's vocabulary estimate, there is little scientific basis to claim that differences on the order of 1% should be considered as statistically significant. Heck, for all we know, differences on the order of 50% may not be statistically significant here...

 

Some people are very good at using words, it's not just a matter of knowing them. Arfa is probably right that the test may not be very accurate at the top end.

Despite being a self administered test, it is better than multiple choice. If I'd had choices, I would probably have got most of the ones I missed.

I would say that Fraggle is the most fluent wordsmith on here.
He never seems to need to change what he writes.
I am forever finding missing commas and mistakes in my posts, and I have to go back and change them.

 

I thought the test as an indicator of linguistic ability went something like:

Those who can't use all the words on the first page in a sentence that reflects the meaning of each word I would say are significantly challenged. If you can't use all the words in the first column of page 2, you're somewhat challenged, and so on up to not being able to use any words in the last column being not challenged much at all.

My guess is I would probably have scored more than 38,000 if I'd left all of the last column unchecked. I expect Winston Churchill would have managed most of the last page, so maybe he'd have scored 40,000 or so.

 

A. I do not see anything to distinguish choice of test words in this from others
B. 35,200
C. On the page where the score is given it says derivations are not included
D. 1.5 to 2 times mine

I still believe this and many other tests wildly overestimate vocabulary size.
Without going back and looking it up I recall that Shakespeare’s total vocabulary
was about 27,000-29,000 words including derivations, and there is no way
in hell my vocabulary is bigger than Shakespeare’s. For that matter I doubt
Churchill’s was either.

 

Well, if Fraggle's info that most users here are teenagers is true, then we might expect an "SAT-prep" effect. I.e., people will have memorized a considerable number of definitions for fancy words (the term "SAT words" is often used for exactly this sort of esoteric vocabulary), but not really internalized them into their actual usage. I suspect that a lot of people's vocabularies actually peak around the end of high school - they memorize a ton of words for college-admissions tests, but never really get into using them outside of standardized tests, and then forget most of them over the subsequent years.

 

Not sure exactly what percentage of Indians can speak Hindi, but I do notice a pretty strong geographic effect. I.e., it seems way less common in south Indians - I know dozens of south Indians through school/work/personal life, and only a handful of them know Hindi well enough to speak. Only maybe two of them would count as "fluent." And these are all highly educated people (PhD's from major US research universities, etc.). Every single one of them has been fluent in English, although there's likely some sample bias there in that I met all of them in the USA.

 

Several tests were mentioned in the other thread, and I do not recall
anything amiss with any of them, including the one you are complaining of:

http://www.write-better-english.com/vocabulary-test.aspx

And I am going to disagree with you and leave it at that that brig-
gangway-trawl-dory and any others in any way skew the test results.

As for 1890s esoteria not a single word I recognize stands out as
unreasonably dated for a modern reader.

I believe this test realistically assesses vocabulary size. I encourage you
and others to cite results obtained from it and no other so as not to convey
inflated impression of your vocabulary sizes.

1,000,000 means nothing unless you can provide evidence that people
such as me and you know something like 20,000 of them.

Also, I feel sure the vast majority of the newest words, such as
picosecond and petabyte, are technical terms, not known by anyone
but specialists.

If new words based on Greek and Latin enter the language constantly
and have become generally recognized, then you should be able to
provide dozens of coinages from just the last 20 years as recognizable
to most people as “television”. Let’s hear about them please.

New words might make a difference of 1-2,000 in the vocabularies
of most people, but they could not account for the more than 10,000
word advantage that you, me and most others here supposedly enjoy
over Shakespeare.

 

I seriously doubt vocabulary size peaks at a young age.

Personally and anecdotally I took some standardized test prep tests
posted elswhere and my results were pretty darn good, so much so
that I am confident my vocabluary size is a lot better than when I
last took the SAT (1966- scored 612V I think)

 

a=5640
b=9660
c=15550


???

 

the context....prepping for tests
the variable.....retention

thats easy
southerners speak dravidian languages
northerners, indo-aryan

english is the preferred medium of communication btw the groups
i think

 

Churchill's strength was not so much his vocabulary, it was his masterful use of words which will impress people as long as people read history.

Vocabularies above 30,000.
A lot of these words are only of use in completing crossword puzzles.
Anyone with any sense would avoid using a great number of them and use simpler words instead.

After all, the purpose of language is to communicate, not to impress people with your vocabulary.

Shakespeare is an unusual case.
Whenever he couldn't think of an existing word to communicate his intended meaning, he made up a word.
That shouldn't have worked theoretically.

Try it yourself.

 

Estivation is what desert animals do between rains...

Estivation-

A waiting, full of frog bones,
under the surface
There is life in the stones,
Hiding from the fist of the sun,
Far underground,
Things sleep in the cold dry dark,
Interred, enwombed,
Awaiting the return of the water.

-(c) me, 1995 or so, piss off.​

 

I see you are quoting the poem I wrote in 1995.
I copyrighted it so no-one could steal it.
That me is me.