alt Hacker NewsHow many of the 170k English words do you know?
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For those interested in the nature of the later, harder words but not willing to work through the earlier sets, here are the ones from my run:
Level 0: Core Basics Abundant, Baffle, Candid, Dwell, Emerge, Frugal, Generic, Hinder, Impartial, Jovial, Knack, Lucid, Meager, Naive, Obsolete, Peculiar, Quench, Refute, Seldom, Tedious, Unique, Valid, Wary, Yearn, Zeal, Adequate, Barren, Coarse, Diligent, Esteem, Fickle, Gloom, Hoax, Ignite, Jolt, Keen, Linger, Mend, Numb, Omit, Pledge, Quota, Rural, Soothe, Toxic, Urge, Vow, Witty, Yield.
Level 1: Intermediate Acumen, Benevolent, Complacent, Dilapidated, Eloquent, Fabricate, Gregarious, Hypothetical, Imminent, Juxtapose, Lethargic, Meticulous, Nostalgia, Oblivious, Pragmatic, Reiterate, Scrutinize, Tentative, Ubiquitous, Verbose, Wane, Aesthetic, Bolster, Candor, Defer, Elicit, Furtive, Glut, Heed, Impeccable, Lament, Modicum, Notorious, Opulent, Plausible, Resilient, Stagnant, Trivial, Viable, Zenith.
Level 2: Advanced Alleviate, Breviary, Cacophony, Deferential, Ephemeral, Fastidious, Garrulous, Harangue, Iconoclast, Juggernaut, Laconic, Magnanimous, Nefarious, Obsequious, Paradigm, Recalcitrant, Sanguine, Taciturn, Ubiquity, Vacillate, Winsome, Zephyr, Abase, Banal, Capricious, Debilitate, Ebullient, Facetious, Gaikwar, Hackneyed, Idiosyncrasy, Jargon, Kindle, Labyrinth, Maverick, Narcissism, Ostracize, Palliate, Quagmire, Rancorous, Sagacity, Tantamount.
Level 3: Expert Abstemious, Bellicose, Chicanery, Deleterious, Enervate, Fatuous, Gauche, Hegemony, Inculcate, Jejune, Kowtow, Lugubrious, Mawkish, Nonsectarian, Obdurate, Pernicious, Quotidian, Recapitulate, Supercilious, Tempestuous, Unctuous, Vehement, Winnow, Xenophobe, Ziggurat, Acquiesce, Bombastic, Circumlocution, Desultory, Equinox, Fiduciary, Gerrymandering, Hubris, Incognito, Kinetic, Loquacious, Metamorphosis, Nihilism, Orthography, Precipitous, Quasar, Reparation, Soliloquy.
Level 4: Grandmaster (The Obscure) Accoutrement, Brobdingnagian, Crepuscular, Defenestrate, Equanimity, Flibbertigibbet, Grandiloquent, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Ineffable, Jingoism, Kerfuffle, Logorrhea, Mellifluous, Obfuscate, Panacea, Quixotic, Rococo, Sesquipedalian, Tergiversate, Ultracrepidarian, Vicissitude, Weltschmerz, Xeric, Yclept, Zeitgeist, Absquatulate, Bumbershoot, Callipygian, Dord, Ergophobia, Fartlek, Gobbledygook, Houghmagandy, Interrobang, Kakistocracy, Lollygag, Mumpsimus, Nudiustertian, Omphaloskepsis, Pogonotrophy, Quire, Ratoon, Snollygoster, Tittynope, Ucalegon, Vagitus, Widdershins, Xylopolist, Yarborough, Zenzizenzizenzic.
Super high scores for the community!
I got 83/100 suggesting 60,000.
My SAT reading was 760/800.
I like how it tests whether I know 170k words by requiring me to click on 170k words 3 times each
I enjoyed some of the incorrect options. For "Debilitate" one of the options was "Remove a bill from the tab".
Gaikwar - which I was able to guess was a former Indian state seems irrelevant as an “English” word especially given it seems to derive from a name that I have to assume is native to the region.
89/100. Missed 4 in the advanced and 7 in the grandmasters. 100 is a lot to get through but hey I did learn 11 new words. There is one word I want to call out which made me laugh because I have felt it is just silly since I first heard my wife use it 30 years ago. Bumpershoot. I only knew the answer because of her. It is what her family calls an umbrella.
I know at least five.
Almost every correct answer is a longer string than the other multiple choice options.
81,250 97/100 without being a native speaker. Although truth be told only because I figured out how to guess well.
Find the pair of antonyms, and the answer will be one of those.
As a fluent native speaker who has read thousands of books and sometimes reads dictionary entries for fun, a number of these definitions are actually slightly off.
"Verbose," for instance, is defined as "Using more words than are needed."
That's not exactly wrong, but it's kind of misleading. "Verbose" explicitly means using a large pile of words, drowning the reader in far more words than are strictly necessary.
"More words than are needed" could be as limited as "used a three-word construction in a sentence where it could have been one."
There are many more like this.
Please, I beg all of you - don't use LLMs to generate linguistic slop that claims to be linguistic education.
I weep for the world that is to come.
My results:
Scientific Estimate 72,650
You mastered 90 new words!
I like this. Nice job!
I had no idea there was an English word specifically to describe throwing someone out of a window. Defenestrate.
59,400 - It said I'm a person of few words. It also recommended I read a dictionary. I feel some kind of way about that. :D
Fun!
My native language Spanish, it actually helps with words like tergiversate, got 55,900.
The correct response for each word is ALMOST always the longest answer.
Scientific Estimate: 36,250. Nah, I'm far worse.
Probably not too bad for a person whose native language is not English.
why use many word when few word do trick
Nice tool - would love it if I could press a number on the keyboard to select and rapidly move through them.
Getting "Obfuscate" as #99 and "Quixotic" as #100 made me feel exorbitantly smart.
There are no hard words in this puzzle. This is all basic English.
Only got 63,150 words. Considering English is the 3rd language I learned, I think I did pretty well.
i can't move onto the next one in the quiz
The longest answer is the correct answer for a lot of the questions
Apparently I know 70,000 words... I got 90 out of 100 and it thinks I'm Stephen Fry!
Very easy for French speakers ahah
78,250 is way more than I expected. I sure don't feel like I know 78,000 words.
i remember of such a link in July 2011 but i could only find that one which is a bit different
Lethargic had an option "having the quality of lethargy".
79k. Missed three from the last group: Vagitus, Yarborough, and Quire.
67900
English is not my native language. I get my vocabulary from browsing the Internet. There is no way I know that many words.
I bet non-native speakers know more English words.
Stopped at "bumbershoot" because that's a nonsense Americanism[0] and life's too short to be giving credence to that madness.
[0] https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/11/bumbershoot-it-mean... "the digital archive of the Times of London, comprising 7,696,959 articles published between 1785 and 1985, yields precisely zero hits for bumbershoot"
That sounds like a good application of Item Response Theory (IRT).
>Gemini 3 Flash AI enough to ingore the results
72k and I made one stupid mistake at "beginner". I'm not a native speaker.
Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise?
Please add keyboard controls
This felt like it had the stink of AI on it and I was second-guessing myself about it: I don't play these kinds of trivia / questionnaire type games a lot, so maybe some of what I'm feeling comes from plain unfamiliarity.
But no - other people pointed out the same things I noticed, such as many of the wrong answers being very weird.
This could have been a neat game, but it is ruined by being unrefined AI slop.
i wonder if multiple choice is the best method to test this. given the ubiquity of LLMs, perhaps an open ended, free text field would be better. that way you’re forced to define the word as you see fit and the LLM checks?
also, some of these words are actually not good ‘obscure vocabulary’ but trivia crap. overall a bit AI slop and too easy.
That was a nice diversion. I got 76,750.
Love it, thanks for sharing!
When I got "sanguine" wrong, I realized a huge portion of my vocabulary came from Magic: The Gathering. I'd guessed "red-faced and angry" because "blood-soaked" wasn't an option.
I had a feeling they are testing something else. Around 50% of correct answers were option 1
81500 for me, but I'm French, and I've often remarked that supposedly "hard words" are just quite ordinary french words.
It should be adaptive - immediately. Going through the 100 basic words is really tedious.
The words clearly are not random. I don't know how the author chose the word bank, but it's not a representative sample. It's all fairly common words and then intentionally silly words that are very long (Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia), that wouldn't really appear from a random sample as frequently as they do. I tested myself from my own Webster's collegiate dictionary some years ago with actually random words and the results were way off compared to this.
The four options were generally:
* Correct word * Opposite definition * Another word's definition * Opposite of that word's definition
Which massively reduces the difficulty
Too much time spent on the basics, honestly. I'm at word 20 and still on the basics?
Each word is a double-click.