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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2347 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 31, 2023

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Fun test linked from Twitter, it's a test of your vocabulary relative to others and displays your percentile score:

https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/

Most people were bragging about their 0.10-1%Ile scores, so I rolled up my sleeve was all, "you are like a little baby, watch this:"

/images/16856192262800865.webp

I would have been disappointed with anything less than the limit of their results, I consistently beat out millions of international competitors in a pure test of English ages back, and it seems I've still got it baby.

Getting a high score in English was piss easy. Japanese also wasn’t too bad.

Chinese, on the other hand, was actually quite difficult, and the types of questions also were more varied. Are Chinese students that much more literate compared to Japan?

Something about the calibration of this seems wrong.

I got 30346, which it claims is more 99.99th percentile. So I took the test in Spanish and got 13330, which it claims is 75th percentile. In CEFR terms, my proficiency in Spanish is A2/B1 (i.e. I have ~2000 words of vocabulary and the English equivalent of my conversational skill would be "Hello and good mornings, I am faul_sname and it is good to be meeting you, my Spanish are not so well so please the talking slowly").

I have doubts about this test.

So do I, I think it's not comprehensive enough to differentiate at the tail end, and I expect most Mottizens to have 99.9th percentile scores anyway. I suspect everyone is getting full scores.

Maybe a lot of people who are trash at Spanish are taking it and inflating scores?

30177 for me (for English), so the trend's keeping up.

I got a 50th percentile for the Spanish (I last did any Spanish in 6th grade). I was mostly just using English or Latin cognates, or sometimes the fact that this was obviously a translation of the English quiz, which helped occasionally. (And multiple choice helps)

Took the test, got 30148.

Git gud.

30232 . Git gudder. Curious why these scores are so variable at the top end, pretty sure I didn't miss any, unless it's timed or something?

I got top 0,20 % in English test and top 50 % in Finnish test, lol. The Finnish test was pretty strange, though.

30,280 at 0.01 percentile. Checkmate gaytheists. I am apparently "Shakespearen" and have been granted license to add words to the dictionary. Literally my first act will be to revert the definition of "literally."

/images/16857141042367923.webp

I would also like to point out that I only took it once and while I was taking a shit.

Edit: Misspelled Shakespearean above. License revoked.

I got top 0.22%, better than I was expecting since I have relatively weak verbal skills. But hey, apparently vocab tests are highly g loaded, so I'll take my suggested 142(?) IQ!

I'm not much of a reader. I only knew avarice because of Dark Souls (ring of avarice), and alacrity because of Dota (an Invoker spell).

I scored top 0.14%. Good enough to enjoy those top 0.01% posters.

30191 here. I missed avulse but think I got all the rest.

I got 30,246 and also got avulse wrong. Maybe there are a handful of points for speed?

I got 30351. Got avulse right bc I used to frequent gore sites and there was a mildly famous medical case where someone suicided with a rifle and blew his brain out right out of his head and somehow it stayed reasonably intact.

Maybe there are a handful of points for speed?

I was wondering about that.

Top 0.25%, which I'm pretty happy with as a non native speaker.

30188 here, there were a few words I straight up had no idea about.

I also rolled up the 0.01% result, which I feel more than a little skeptical of. I would think more than one in 10K people is getting all of those right. Either way, it's pretty fun.

I felt the same. I still come across a lot of words I don't know when reading old books or technical stuff.

Not sure how, but I managed 30141. I had to guess on a few - querulous, avulse (which I must have gotten wrong), and another.

Your English Vocabulary Size is:

22542

Top 5.76%

Your vocabulary is at the level of professional white-collars in the US!

Alas, I am but a tiny brainlet. My cranium is smooth and without ridges.

I remember beating all my colleagues at this though, so that's good.

I got top 5.44% so we can be midwits together!

There were a couple words that I wasn't familiar with, and I think heavy reddit usage and lack of reading has probably diminished my vocabulary somewhat, but all in all I can't complain.

As previously mentioned in this thread, I don't think this result is particularly accurate, but it's a fun little test!

Congrats on a high score! Despite popular misconception, vocabulary is the best task to test general intelligence, being most highly correlated to other intelligence tasks:

https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/which-test-has-the-highest-g-loading

Now, some criticisms of this particular test, which I took and received a humiliating 95th percentile, which feels too low for me, although to be fair I didn't take any time to think when I didn't immediately know the correct answer.

  • The test seems to be the same for everyone. It would work better if the difficulty increased/decreased depending on which questions are answered correctly, ala the GRE.

  • It feels too short. The luck of guessing correctly factors too highly.

  • I had some quibbles with the accuracy of some of the questions. I've written trivia (even an IQ test!) in the past. Some of these questions don't pass muster in my opinion, but I can't be certain because they didn't show the correct answers.

  • I think the scatter is probably too high. What this means is that there shouldn't be any questions "out of left field". The chances of answering any one question correctly should correlate highly with the chance of answering any other correctly. Their shouldn't be any terms that are extremely obscure (unless necessary) or require special knowledge. Avulse seems to fit the bill here. My spellchecker is currently flagging it, lol.

  • No test of this duration and rigor can possibly assign a score in the top 1%, let alone top 0.1%.

But don't listen to me, apparently I'm a moron. I'm also aware that this site is a pop culture site and does not claim any sort of scientific rigor.

There's no way you're 95th percentile unless you really weren't paying attention to the test! I'd suggest giving it again and more seriously this time haha.

I think there's a great deal of range restriction on the very extreme right, such that it's compressing the values that very talented people would score to distinguish themselves from each other. The highest it's possible to score is around 30.1k words and still the 0.01th percentile.

Funnily enough, I'm aware of avulse from avulsions, a type of wound we studied in trauma care in medicine. I'd still have been able to guess it was the right one from elimination, but I also would have heard it in other contexts.

Besides, it's just a fancy way of saying tear injuries as opposed to cuts and stabs.

I'm flattered that this indicates a high IQ, but I'm pretty sure my skill is highly lopsided, I'm an arch wordcel but only somewhat above average as a shape rotator, I don't think I'd make a good engineer or mathematician.

English has anywhere from a million to several million words depending on who you ask, and it only takes the knowledge of 10k of them to be considered fluent. I scored 30k here, but I suspect in a more exhaustive test I'd be at least a 100k if not more, as would many of the very high scorers all lumped in at 0.01th percentile.

Let's see. Here are 50 words chosen at random from a 178,000 Scrabble word set.

Actual, Assemblagists, Banteringly, Basks, Consubstantial, Cosmeticized, Cosmic, Curator, Disconcertingly, Fawns, Foreshowed, Fornical, Fugleman, Gadroon, Hoyles, Ices, Kingfishes, Lachrymose, Lemongrasses, Macrocytic, Merrymakings, Microbrewings, Mirthfully, Multilateral, Noncompetitors, Nyalas, Outstrip, Parliamentary, Pavise, Recheats, Reconfers, Relictions, Scrubs, Seg, Serfage, Shakinesses, Sweeneys, Telepathic, Teratomas, Terebene, Terrify, Topmast, Trachoma, Twaddle, Underclays, Unseated, View, Whoremongers, Wrinkly, Yen

30k does seem like a underestimate due to the ability to know words via construction. For example if I know kind, I also know kindly, unkindly, kindliness, etc...

The problem I guess is what happens to words that I've never used but that I can figure out with near 100% confidence: "microbrewings, banteringly, reconfers, etc..." I would say these DON'T count because you couldn't say that they are a real word or just made up.

And then there are words such as Candible and Fervifying that aren't in the Scrabble dictionary, but the meanings of which can be derived if you know the base words and suffixes.

Yeah I think the word-count extrapolations are questionable here -- I am apparently in the top .15 %tile, at 29817 words; while it's entirely possible that you know 270 more words than I do (probably much more than that, because doctor!) I'm not sure how one would be able to tell from this test.

Yeah I wouldn't really trust the tests on that page too much, I took their IQ test and got 158 on it, which a ridiculous overestimation based on the previous tests I took, where I got like 135-140.

I got 160 on that website as well and the cherry on top was the "Albert Einstein" banner that popped up below, actual fucking meme. My real IQ is probably around 130 as well, from educational/testing proxies.

You're assuming that there's any way to distinguish between 135 and 158 on a short test. There's not. Longer tests aren't great at this either.

More Kirkegaard:

https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/some-people-have-iqs-of-160

"Some people have IQs of 160 / But technical limitations make it difficult to say who exactly"

hmm, top 0.2% for me, I'm kind of surprised, I never made any explicit effort in all my english classes, and I'm not even a native speaker.

/images/1685626469587057.webp

I wonder how you got this result. I got top 3% or so, redid the test with the only difference being answering avulse correctly and got top 0.1%.

Maybe I just have fat fingers or this is scored really curiously.

I might have fucked up one of the easier ones, but gotten avulse correctly. That would explain things if difficult questions are worth more.

I feel this has to be invalid.

I don't feel I really know English and the only 'learning' I've ever done was that I've read cca 300 mostly fairly trashy (sf, urban fantasy) books.

Could native speaker vocabulary really be that bad? Do people not read in the Anglosphere ?

/images/16856256435549674.webp

Do people not read in the Anglosphere ?

Ifonlyyouknewhowbadthingsreallyare.jpg

Your English Vocabulary Size is: 30100 ★★★ Top 0.01%

Bit annoying that it doesn't say which ones you missed. Most of it was very easy but one or two were educated guesses for words I'd never seen before. I can't remember the word (something like "avular"?) but I chose "suture" as the antonym.

Avulse, I was familiar with both terms because I'm a doctor but I do think I have heard of avulsions in other contexts and would have been able to answer it.

The word is "avulse||", and it's apparently a medicinal term that means "||pull or tear away||", so "||suture||" is the right choice. I chose that as well, simply because ||"avulse" sounded so utterly obscure that I figured it had to be some technical term.

Thanks, that was pretty much my reasoning too. "I suppose suture would have an antonym, so maybe that's it?".

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