Today, I discovered an interesting test on The Economist website. The website, testyourvocab.com, is hosting a serious research project to measure how many words the average English speaker knows.
You can take the test here.
Given that the English language has 171,476 words in current use, my result of 26,300 words was pretty embarrassing. Furthermore, my vocabulary is below average for someone who had my verbal SAT score.
Anyway, I am curious to see how others fare on this test.
Enjoy!
Reflections of a Rational Republican 
Hmmm… 40,300.
Then again, I do read quite a bit.
Not bad for a slacker like myself.
Good Lord!
If you’re feeling the need to brush up, you can always head over to http://freerice.com/ and build your vocabulary while fighting world hunger.
I got 37,900. I also read a lot, and I’m just slightly under what someone with my SAT score would average.
I cannot wait to have my wife and daughter take this. They will probably both beat me.
I got 32,700 and that’s pretty much average for the age group closest to me with my SAT score.
I don’t think we even had SAT back in the Stone Age. But I beat ya lad (if not some of your other commenters) – 36,500
that was suposed to read (though not some of your commenters)
I still have the lowest score thus far. I just wish someone would post something lower. 😉
The good news is that I’m attracting readers who are smarter than I am. 😉
You’re just honest Sean. Betcha the others who got lower scores are scairdy cats and not commenting.!~
Maybe…
One of my teachers put “sesquipedalian” on the board, and asked us what it meant.
I scarcely had the heart to tell her that not only did I know what it meant, I knew she had misspelled it.
Was this in grade school or high school? If high school, what teacher?
College, which made the spelling error downright depressing.
I told you I had a terrible score. Must have had something to do with 5 monosyllabic years in the Army. 😉
I scored 31,100 and honestly don’t remember my SAT scores. This does lead me to say that you could have had a good day when you took the SAT, and a bad day when you took this vocab test.
I also don’t remember studying or preparing for any of my college entry tests. That was back in the 1960’s when I believed their instructions that studying would not improve results. Since then, a huge industry has grown around preparing high school students for their college entrance exams.
Bob – sounds like we’re about the same age – damned if I can remember taking SAT’s, but perhaps I did?
I must have had a good day on the SAT and a bad day on this test. 😉
Yup :). It really didn’t make sense to me given my familiarity with your writing!
31,000, which looks to be about what my age and SAT score average out to in the sample. I’m happy to dig my heels in to say that nobody needs more than 31,000 words. Liberal academic elitists.
As a lawyer, you had better have high verbal scores. 😉
I am a quant jockey at heart. I once took the LSAT and man it was not pretty…
Why, I must be pretty darn efficient at 26,300 – cave man style…
30k for me. I didn’t spend any time in the military but I do read a lot of books with pictures in them.
It must be because you are Canadian. 😉
I’m not a native speaker, having Finnish as my mother tongue, so I got 10 500. The result really makes me want to improve my vocabulary. Though, I find it quite difficult. I’ve tried to read some good literature, hopefully that’ll help.
That’s still an impressive number. The only other language I speak is German, and I guarantee you I cannot speak nearly that many words.
So, I got 25,600. Which is slightly below average for my age (25) but not by much. And its quite a bit below my SAT score average. So, I don’t know what that means, but I guess I have some time to improve. Maybe I’ll have to make a conscious effort to start using 25 cent words more often 🙂
Farah, you were probably just too honest. There were a ton of words I recognized, but wasn’t 100% sure of the definition, so I didn’t check them. That said, if I saw them on a multiple choice test like the SAT, I would likely get them right.
Yes, that exact thing had crossed my mind. I was thinking that there were probably a lot of people who would just check off every word they recognized rather than taking the time to think about whether or not they could actually define it. It makes me feel better to think that, anyway. 🙂
What I do find interesting is that I read business publications for at least half of every day at work, and there were still a number of words I didn’t know. I wonder if the ones they chose to use for the survey are more common to a specific type of literature (i.e. not the ones I read) and that’s why I didn’t know them. I think that’s what they try to get at with the questions at the end, where it asks how much you read and then how much you read fiction literature specifically.
It’s possible.
I expect they’re just looking to see how the genre fans measure up against each other, but it could be that the survey will reveal which category of literature tends towards the greatest range of vocabulary.
Pretty much exclusively science-fiction and fantasy in my case, for the record, with some nonfiction thrown in for self-edification.
I read about 50/50 non-fiction/fiction with about 100% of my fiction sci-fi or fantasy. I suspect classic fiction readers would have the highest scores, but you blew that hypothesis out of the water.
Also, if you read some of the background material on the site, only the smartest people are taking this test, so the average is, well not so average. 😉
I am happy with my score, but also disappointed that it is not higher. 37,800 out of an estimated 300,000. We all need to do better, especially as native English speakers.
Agreed.