Posted on by Teal

Test your vocabulary in four minutes

On the basis of your results, we estimate you know 81% of the English words.
You are at the top level!
— Ghent University Word Test

Well, that feels good.

It’s funny because just two days ago, I talked to Liron about how I feel my English vocabulary is lacking and how my expressiveness often feels limited to me. After some deliberation, we found out that we both struggle in similar areas – mostly social sciences, political terms, and similar domains full of technical terms. So yeah, maybe my English isn’t as bad as I think, I just pick hard topics to talk about.

If you want to test your English vocabulary and have a few minutes to spare, you can help the psycholinguists at the Ghent University by taking their Word test. Please do share your results in the comments!

Vocabulary test result: You know 81% of English words.

Also interesting: The variance stemming from the word sampling. In three tests, I got 76%, 81% and 89%. That last run seemed like it had almost no non-words.

12 Replies to “Test your vocabulary in four minutes”

  2. 80% with 0% non-existing. I had a lot of engineering words. And you?

  3. I got 87% with 0% non words. Surprised by the actual words that I didn’t recognize as such…

  4. 49% – 0% = 49%.

    “This is fairly high level for a native speaker.” it says — did they mean “for a non-native speaker”?

  5. @Basti Ne, das ist auch für native Speaker schon hoch. Man schätzt den passiven Wortschatz von Native Speakers auf so 12-15k Worte.

  6. In the FAQ it says non-native speakers only know 10% to 33% of the vocabularies. Natives only know about 66% — so how did you all do this?

  7. 87% words − 0% non-words = 87%, but I’m going to walk away with that flattering result and not take three samples like you did, moeffju 🙂

  8. 84-0%. Unter den nicht erkannten Wörtern waren Adjektive, die ich so nie und nimmer bilden würde, archaische Wörter, je ein Fachbegriff aus Paläo- und Botanik, und zwei wo ich aus Versehen die falsche Taste gedrückt habe. 😛

    Zweiter Versuch mit etwas mehr Konzentration: 94-0%.

  9. Ich hatte immer 75 % – 80 %
    Das reicht mir auch ziemlich 😀 Wenn ich mir da so die Wörter ansehe die ich nicht wusste, dann macht mir das auch gar nix, dass ich die nicht kannte. Sowas hätte ich gerne mal für die deutsche Sprache.
    Aber: Nur weil wir Wörter kennen heißt das nicht automatisch, dass sie uns dann einfallen wenn wir sie brauchen. Das geht mir auch oft genug im Deutschen so.

  10. 46 % native german speaker but i read a lot in english.
    0 mistakes with fictional words.

    list of the words i didnt know. but things like attractor, kittyish, karmic, deflectable, etc i could guess, but honestly i wouldnt know if they were proper english words that are actually used like that.

    i will try including such next time

    makeweight 2.932 Look up Not a word!
    tulle 1.595 Look up Not a word!
    blancher 1.866 Look up Not a word!
    attractor 6.744 Look up Not a word!
    debentured 1.581 Look up Not a word!
    valorization 1.425 Look up Not a word!
    karmic 8.535 Look up Not a word!
    psalmody 1.159 Look up Not a word!
    deflectable 8.575 Look up Not a word!
    lavaliere 2.094 Look up Not a word!
    shackling 1.959 Look up Not a word!
    contrariwise 1.154 Look up Not a word!
    syncope 1.265 Look up Not a word!
    kittenish 10.269 Look up Not a word!
    xylography 0.996 Look up Not a word!
    sigma 2.192 Look up Not a word!
    remindful 1.769 Look up Not a word!
    permittivity 3.842 Look up Not a word!
    assonant 2.392 Look up Not a word!
    auspicious 6.158 Look up Not a word!
    swapper 3.398 Look up Not a word!
    lei 0.978 Look up Not a word!
    culler 7.965 Look up Not a word!
    relicense 5.149 Look up Not a word!
    monostich 1.187 Look up Not a word!
    mercuric 7.567 Look up Not a word!
    sturgeon 1.061 Look up Not a word!
    landplane 2.75 Look up Not a word!
    utopianism 0.994 Look up Not a word!
    hydrazine 1.359 Look up Not a word!
    flibbertigibbet 1.112 Look up Not a word!
    gab 0.993 Look up Not a word!
    unwrought 5.478 Look up Not a word!
    becharm 4.908 Look up Not a word!
    bungler 1.123 Look up Not a word!
    difficultly 1.917 Look up Not a word!
    bobbinet 0.751 Look up Not a word!
    banns 0.741 Look up Not a word!

  11. sorry for the badly formatted list. it showed (up?) fine when i wrote the comment and pasted it in.
    second run, 83% with 2 false words mistaken for existing ones.
    mobile browser already deleted the results so i cant copy those two as examples.

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