Mine was 31,300. I was a bit disappointed in myself because I saw a ton of words I recognized late in the test that I couldn't properly remember without context, so I didn't count them as words I knew. My brain is turning to tapioca in my dotage, lol.
I got 27,600. Practically twins! (And fyi, I think we're roughly the same age, in which case we're 4,000 words ahead of the average for our age, according to their results! Haha.)
I've always done well on this kind of thing... but I wonder how they can extrapolate from the list of words you say you know, up into the thousands.
I always heard that Shakespeare has the broadest usage vocabulary of any writer, so I googled and found this article, which says that Shakespeare is often said to have a vocabulary between 18 and 25000 words.... which, I scored 40,500 so clearly in this test they are doing something different! Basically the article indicates that research studies like this one are needed because people's vocabularies seem to be underestimated. http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm
I was in grad school in English for 12 years... and my husband is a Shakespearean actor.... so we do have a leg up. :P
My husband beat me by 200, but he was mistaken about some of the words. :P I think we like to think we know what they mean ! I looked up the ones I didn't know or was dubious about. :)
I still am not sure about this high of a number though. I always thought that around 10,000 words was the most the average person would consistently use.... so I don't know how they have arrived at this. :)
I got 27,800. Kinda depressing. I scored a perfect score on the Reading part of the ACT for crying out loud, you'd think I'd be better at this! Guess maybe I shouldn't take this at 11:30pm in the heat. ;)
It seems that way! They are claiming this is the worst summer since 1980 (a summer of legend and myth apparently). And last winter they did get a few inches of snow and had some concerns about ice around SuperBowl time. We're in the part of Texas that actually has seasons, such that they are. But it has fried my brain, I literally forget things in the middle of sentences and that's on top of my celiac disease related short term memory loss.
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I've always done well on this kind of thing... but I wonder how they can extrapolate from the list of words you say you know, up into the thousands.
I always heard that Shakespeare has the broadest usage vocabulary of any writer, so I googled and found this article, which says that Shakespeare is often said to have a vocabulary between 18 and 25000 words.... which, I scored 40,500 so clearly in this test they are doing something different! Basically the article indicates that research studies like this one are needed because people's vocabularies seem to be underestimated.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm
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My husband beat me by 200, but he was mistaken about some of the words. :P I think we like to think we know what they mean ! I looked up the ones I didn't know or was dubious about. :)
I still am not sure about this high of a number though. I always thought that around 10,000 words was the most the average person would consistently use.... so I don't know how they have arrived at this. :)
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