04 August 2011

Vocabulary test

A hat tip to Fritinancy for her post about the Test Your Vocab site.
Test Your Vocab is part of an American-Brazilian research project “to measure vocabulary sizes according to age and education, and particularly to compare native learning rates with foreign language classroom learning rates.” (The Brazilian project hasn’t launched yet.) The first part of the test determines general vocabulary level; the second part has “a larger but narrower selection of words to determine the vocabulary level with greater precision.”
I missed mawkish, pastiche, chivvy, adumbrate, disjunctive, melange, sedulous, epigone, captious, tenebrous, embonpoint, pother, valetudinarian, cenacle, cantle, clerisy, deracinate, fuliginous, oneiromancy, caitliff, funambulist, and opsimath.  That's 22 words (which a certain blogger will find interesting).   The test seems to measure only knowledge of conventional words, not the specialized vocabulary of science specialties, etc., and doesn't calculate your knowledge of non-English words.  Feel free to brag about your results in the Comments.

The test is here.  At the test's blog they provide this graph of vocabulary acquisition vs. age:

23 comments:

  1. 25k for non-native is pretty solid methinks. And I guess I would have scored somewhat higher if there had been more technical terms.

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  2. I scored 33,800. Not sure if that's worth anything, though. Hemingway did pretty good for himself using far fewer. "Adumbrate" doesn't come up in conversation all that often--if ever--and I think that's the first time I've written that word in my 31-year career as a writer.

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  3. 40,500. What it is to be an English major.

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  4. I am stunned that anyone knew what terpsichorean. I am also shocked that Minnesota Stan missed mawkish which has to be one of my favorite words especially when used in conjunction with maudlin.

    I really wish that you could take 3 or 4 sets of these with different words so that you could get a grasp of the error inherent in the test.

    Also M. Stan is quite right that they ignore jargon inherent in specialty language. I would say that an undergrad in Biochem and now a law degree raises my total vocabulary immensely.

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  5. I got 34,600; http://testyourvocab.com/?r=509106
    However, That made me want to go look up mawkish, so I suppose it's now at 34,601=)

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  6. 34,100, which is respectable for my age group. I was surprised how many of those words I didn't recognize! Tough test.

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  7. 25900, not bad for a non native I believe. Lucky me, some words have obvious latin roots, making them easier to understand for a francophone. ;-)

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  8. 38,100; definitely used a little Latin knowledge to make out a few. My highschool Philosophy teacher's favorite word was "funabulist" --score! :)

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  9. I had a go at the test a few days ago, but I found it too ambiguous. The instructions say, "don't check words whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of", but it's impossible to apply that standard rigorously. There's a continuum from "vaguely aware of the general meaning" to "confident in my understanding of all its connotations", and I'm not willing to pretend that knowing a word can be reduced to a binary proposition.

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  10. While I recognized and am "familiar" with a lot of the words in the test, being totally honest with myself I found that many I didn't know well enough to actually define or use in conversation or my own writing. 27,400 for me.

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  11. There's another variable here: words you think you know the meaning of but really don't. For example, how many people are convinced "enormity" denotes size or magnitude?

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  12. "Enormity" is more complicated than you may realize, Jerry. See this post and its comments -

    http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/06/enormity-vs-enormousness.html

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  13. Okay, Stan, bad example. But you can see the problem with the test in this regard.

    I once edited a piece about a trip around the world that contained a reference to "circumventing the globe" on a motorcycle. Another said an injured racer was sitting out the next three races in order to "coalesce at home." These writers sincerely thought they knew what these words meant. If they had seen them on the vocab test they would have checked those boxes.

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  14. Yes. Kind of like Katie Couric saying yesterday she wouldn't "castrate" Miley Cyrus when I suppose she meant to say "castigate" -

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/04/katie-couric-view-miley-cyrus-castrate_n_918275.html

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  15. 40,500. @ A. Fischer, it helps to have a daughter who loves to dance. We had a cat she named Terpsichore. The next cat was black, and was named Orpheus.

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  16. 27,300 for me. There were a lot of words I recognized, but I couldn't remember their meanings.

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  17. 27,600. So nearly 8,000 words higher than the average for my age group. Represent!

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  18. I only checked those words I could use in a sentence and I got 34,200. I short-changed myself at least once: turns out I know what a tatterdemalion is!

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  19. I scored 31k as a 22 year old. The graph indicates that as time goes on you learn many more words but I can't really imagine learning any of the words that I didn't know in the course of ordinary life. Seems quite interesting to me.

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  20. 34,800.

    Not bad, I guess.

    I don't think any that I didn't include would ever be used by myself, not in public, anyway - who would understand them? Caitiff??? Vibrissae???

    But, actually "williwaw" actually came up a few weeks ago - after the dust/sandstorm in AZ and I went looking for the difference between a dust storm and a sandstorm (evidently none). I went a little afield in my search.

    But I've also been doing a lot of hypnopompic activity lately, and I actually practiced oneiromancy quite a bit in my younger days. Should I make a big pother out of using two in the same sentence?

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