Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Test Your Vocab

Ever wonder what size English vocabulary you have? Here's a test you can take online to give you an estimate.

I took the test and gave honest responses (it's honor system based, so you can lie and say you know the tough words and probably make yourself look better.) I thought I'd absolutely bomb, especially when I hit the final column, but my results surprised me:



Test link nicked from Gerard over at The Presurfer.

22 comments:

  1. 32,300! I thought it would be lower than yours, but surprised it's not that much lower :)

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  2. 27,600. Some of those words from the second set? Never heard of them.

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  3. Actually got something similar.
    Makes me want to hit the dictionary. :)

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  4. That last column did me in too, but I came in at 31,000 words. Some of which I attribute directly to having read many, many romance novels over the years.

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  5. Hmm... 36,200. Okay, so now can I use sesquipedalianism in a sentence?

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  6. Wow! 19,300!! I don't know if that's good or bad, considering it's my third language (the test said 20,000 or above for a native speaker, so I guess it's not that bad), but I don't have any problems reading books and watching shows and movies in English. Some of the words were really hard, though!

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  7. Margaret S6:19 AM

    I did this test and I did notice a lot of the words were the type you would find in historical novels.
    If you have never read any I think your score would drop a fair bit.
    I think bookworms in general have a large mental database of words compared to those who only read occassionally. Also the longer you live the more you collect.

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  8. I got 27800. It was really hard to not check the boxes of words I know I know how to use, but that I don't really know the definition of.

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  9. Wow! I like this. I feel smart. (36,100)

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  10. I really want to thank my 9th grade english teacher now. 35,900.

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  11. Fran Kane10:53 AM

    Wow all those Georgette Heyer & Jean Plaidy novels from my youth really paid off. 33,000!

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  12. Whoa...I got 36,300. I blame my love of historic novels and Mr. Dant. He was my favorite high school English teacher and had a weekly vocabulary test with some truly odd, wonderful words.

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  13. 41,100
    I suspect it's because I write historical romance, because a lot of the words I got were old ones. And I was introduced in the States last year as "This is Lynne. She's British and she talks in complete sentences!"

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  14. 28,600. That puts me firmly in the middle of "Native speaker". Not bad for a second language speaker. Could be better though...where's my dictionary...

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  15. lol, that was fun. 3O,200. I thought I was smarter than that. It's good to be humbled every once in a while.

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  16. @Lynne Connolly LOL!!!

    I hit 38,000, but I too write historical and read a tremendous amount of it and many of those words were very old.

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  17. 31 900 words. Not bad for a non-native speaker.

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  18. Crap, you beat me! (Can you tell I'm hypercompetitive?)

    I wish I had found an obvious spot to leave open-ended feedback. When the survey found out I was a non-native speaker it added all sorts of irrelevant questions that were hard to answer because they didn't seem to consider the possibility that a non-native speaker may still have gone through schooling in English in the US. In particular, it would have been helpful for them to differentiate between "English" courses and "English as a Second Language" courses.

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  19. I came in at 32,000 and was surprised it was that high. The last page was horrific.

    Like many of the others I think being an avid reader helped.

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  20. 7,201 - considering im not a native-speaker it's ok I guess. I love these tests!

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  21. Anonymous5:15 PM

    30,800. Some of the words on the last page were crazy! Did anyone else check out the charts they had which divided results up by age? I thought that was pretty cool to see the gradual increase across the board as people get older.

    Stephanie

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