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So how many words do you know?


Road Runner

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7 minutes ago, MoseySusan said:

Alright, Shakespeare…we are on a mission to get the phrase kitchen window, meaning a practical view, into the dictionary for 2022. So, start using it in your meetings and emails at work. We’re going for 29382. 

Considering my education, I was impressed.  Might not be the 50k of the average person, but I was pleased.

@MoseySusan, what was your score?

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9 minutes ago, Square Wheels said:

.  Might not be the 50k of the average person, but I was pleased

Ima guess that you’ve read/seen and understood every word in this test at some point. Also, the research I linked earlier stated that this test is not a measure of total vocabulary because it doesn’t include proper nouns (like Paris), words that are spelled with symbols (like meow-owww), and words from other languages (like bueno). 

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1 hour ago, Square Wheels said:

Might not be the 50k of the average person, but I was pleased.

And there you have it....

Your vocabulary is approximately  29,381 words and that's in the top 0.25%

If the average person knows 50K of words then I'd expect the top 0.25% to be more like 100K (or more it depends on how flat the curve is)

So either the test I linked is incorrect, or the game show claim that the average person knows 50K of words is incorrect.    I'm betting the game show didn't do their research correctly. Or like @MickinMD explained they included 'passive' vocabulary words in their total.

I'd suggest that 29,381 is a great number.  And 30,118 (top 0.01%) for @Philander Seabury appears to the near the upper limit for the test.  

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1 minute ago, Bikeguy said:

And there you have it....

Your vocabulary is approximately  29,381 words and that's in the top 0.25%

If the average person knows 50K of words then I'd expect the top 0.25% to be more like 100K (or more it depends on how flat the curve is)

So either the test I linked is incorrect, or the game show claim that the average person knows 50K of words is incorrect.    I'm betting the game show didn't do their research correctly. Or like @MickinMD explained they included 'passive' vocabulary words in their total.

I'd suggest that 29,381 is a great number.  And 30,118 (top 0.01%) for @Philander Seabury appears to the near the upper limit for the test.  

Or, you could read the research to find out how they arrived at the number 50k. 

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2 hours ago, MoseySusan said:

Also, the research I linked earlier stated that this test is not a measure of total vocabulary because it doesn’t include proper nouns (like Paris), words that are spelled with symbols (like meow-owww), and words from other languages (like bueno

This, @Bikeguy

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4 hours ago, MoseySusan said:

wo more aspects of word knowledge…word family and homographs.

And this…

These words were “cleaned” from the assessment used in the research…very similar to the one you linked. If you knew clairvoyant then you probably also know clairvoyance and voyeur.

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