The Swede scored 24K. In his defense, he studied years of Latin in school. He thinks that might be why.
21000 words. Now I'm depressed that the average 15 yr old scored better than me. Kind of odd I scored so low, when I performed pretty well with the GRE practice tests(taking it in September). Perhaps I'm just much better at reading words in context rather than understanding the definition itself. Pretty much went WTF at the word list on the 2nd page.
31,900 Part of that is being old. You just have more reading experience. "strop"? I didn't think there would be any four letter words I did not know.
Strop is five letters. Looks like your math skills lag a bit behind your vocab. A strop is the leather strap used to sharpen a razor, IIRC.
31,600. Still in college. If anyone doesn't believe me, I speak three languages and I think Victorian poetry is a fun read.
I see how the site estimates your vocabulary. But why are the numbers so big? Above 30,000 for some of you? Even the ones who claim you don't read much, you still get around 20,000. That doesn't sound right. I think I probably know about 2,000 max.
Not sure how words are calculated, but if you include all the tenses(do/doing/did), plural/singular(child/children) they kind of add up pretty quickly. But yeah, in general we don't use a huge amount of vocabulary in our everyday life. I believe I once read that a certain transnational airline, when training stewardesses, said they really only need like a few hundred words of vocabulary to speak understandable English. Not proper English, but enough for the listener to understand. Honestly, the toughest words I know generally comes from reading fiction and playing video games. Video games in particular tend to use obnoxiously obscure words that you never really find elsewhere.
In their explanation, they say they don't count those. And, if you check off every box, there is 45,000 words total by their count. I remember my English professor in college, who was a Frenchman who managed to become chair of the English department, was praising the English language for having such an absurdly large vocabulary, and how easy it is to express nuance in English because there is a word for so many shades of meaning. Given its history of blending languages, it isn't much surprise it's so big. Supposedly, the OED has 250,000 words defined, not including technical words.
I just caught this. Your second novel? Was the first published? What genre? My sister is a successful romance writer, with a heroine who's a vampire. Very hot bodice rippers (she'd laugh at the term) with a comedic bent. She has 5 published in this series, one about to go to the publisher, and a contract for another. It's not tremendously lucrative, but it's a steady income and she gets royalty checks from countries like Germany and the Netherlands. Seeing her stuff in those languages is a kick for me. I used to write for pleasure when I was younger, but appear to have a terminal case of writer's block. Congratulations! Many don't realize just how tough it can be. Rimrocker ended up with a stunning score and your result was excellent. I don't know how accurate the test is, but it was fun. -
My score was 22,200. I'm a little disappointed, but many of the words on the second page shouldn't be used by anyone at any time in life.
