Question 1

In the final count, what is actually counted as a word?

Accepted Answer

We count headword entries in a standard English dictionary. This means the standard word derivations are not counted (for example, "quickly," derived from "quick," does not count as a separate word). And while compound words are counted (like "air conditioning"), phrases and expressions are not (like "food for thought"). Looking for a way to improve your English vocabulary? Explore our online English classes

Question 2

Why do I have to click so many checkboxes? Can't you check them all by default, and then I uncheck the words I don't know?

Accepted Answer

The test works in two steps. The first step contains 40 words which determine your rough level—do you have the vocabulary of a 3-year-old or a 20-year-old? Since we don't know who you are, we can't assume you'll check most of the boxes.   Then, with the approximate level determined, the second step shows around 120 words in four columns, which are selected in the general area around where we think your vocabulary level is. If we guessed perfectly, the first column should be almost entirely words you know, the last column should be almost entirely words you don't know, and the middle two columns should be a gradient between the two.   If we didn't guess perfectly, we still have a good buffer to give you an accurate result. So some users will find they check more boxes overall, and others will leave more unchecked, so we leave the default to be unchecked. Of course, if you're a linguistic genius and know all the words, then there's nothing we can do, and you'll just have to exercise your finger more!

Question 3

The words seem to jump quickly from really easy to really hard. Shouldn't you have a smoother transition for more accurate measurement?

Accepted Answer

They jump from easy to hard because that's where the limit of your vocabulary is. It's not a feature of our test, it's a feature of vocabulary learning. And while it might seem to you that all the easy words are equally easy, we can assure you that other people would disagree.

Question 4

Your results seem low—doesn't the average adult know more than 27,000 words?

Accepted Answer

There are many different factors that go into measuring someone's vocabulary size—for example, do you count "quick" and "quickly" as two words or just one? After all, "quickly" is just a simple and predictable derivation of "quick." Depending on how different questions like these are decided, vocabulary tests can give widely different results. We take a conservative approach and count the number of headwords (not derived words) which you are estimated to know in a standard dictionary. In the end, what really matters is not your absolute number, but rather your score relative to others who take the same test, no matter how the test is put together. For more details, read in-depth about how the vocab test works.

Question 5

Your results seem high—I'm well-educated and well-read, and I'm pretty sure my vocabulary is in a higher percentile than the results you've listed!

Accepted Answer

You're probably right. The percentiles listed so far are of the people who have taken the quiz, not of the population as a whole. And their average self-reported verbal SAT score, so far, is around 700 (out of a perfect 800 score).  Compare that to the average US population score of around 500, and it's clear that our test-takers are far more literate than average. As the number of participants increases, there should be more data to separate out percentiles based on different self-reported SAT scores, for example, and we'll be able to use this to generate comparison scores that are more representative of the population as a whole.

Question 6

What about non-native speakers? English isn't my first language, and I want to know how I compare.

Accepted Answer

You can see overall relative English levels by country in this blog post. Based on our own experience, we can give you a general idea of foreign language acquisition for students enrolled in private English courses (generally meeting for around 3 hours a week):  1,500–3,000 words: a couple of years of English courses 4,000–6,000 words: intermediate English (4–6 years) 8,000–10,000 words: advanced English (8 years) for a particularly good student  Anything much beyond 10,000 words generally only comes from living abroad in an English-speaking country for a significant period of time, or else spending tremendous amounts of one's own time exposed to English media (books, sitcoms, movies, etc.).

Question 7

I want to use your original list of words to study from. Can I get it?

Accepted Answer

All our frequency information came from Adam Kilgarriff's analysis of the British National Corpus. You'll probably want the lemma.num file, for the first 6,000 or so words. If you're looking for more advanced English, you'll probably want the all.num.o5 file, which contains more than 200,000 entries (although many of them are redundant).

Question 8

Why do you only test up to 45,000 words?

Accepted Answer

Because honestly, there really aren't any more generally-used words than that. The Oxford English Dictionary may list 300,000 words, but after 45,000, they're pretty much all either archaic, scientific/technical, or otherwise inapplicable to any kind of "general" vocabulary test. In fact, finding such general words beyond 35,000 was a real challenge.

Question 9

How accurate is my score?

Accepted Answer

Your vocabulary count has a margin of error of approximately ±10%. We also round results above 10,000 to the nearest 100, and results above 300 to the nearest 10.

Question 10

Can I take the test more than once?

Accepted Answer

Yes. However, the wordlist we use stays relatively the same, each time you take the test. So if you look up any words you're being tested on, during or after the test, then future test results will be artificially high, and will no longer be accurate.  So if you'd like to use this test to track your vocabulary growth, we recommend only taking it once per year at the most, and only if you're very careful never to look up or ask about words you saw on the test.

Question 11

Can you expand to test other languages besides English?

Accepted Answer

We'd like to eventually, but there's an awful lot of work involved in creating a word list that is scientifically accurate because it has to be built on top of solid data. Specifically, for any language, we need to find:   An available corpus, with both a sufficiently large spoken component (for accurately measuring lower vocabulary levels) and written component (for higher levels), with sufficient variety in source material A reliable automatic method for "uninflecting" corpus words into dictionary words — e.g., turning "cupcakes" into "cupcake", and "wrote" into "write", so they don't count as separate words An electronically available comprehensive dictionary, which can be used to filter out proper nouns and non-words from the corpus A native speaker with a programming or data background, who can implement all this accurately, and then go through to manually select appropriate testing words, according to various criteria

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