[Menandore]

24,500 and I'm a native English speaker. It's slightly embarrassing but not in the least bit surprising, I've always been a numbers person and I don't do well remembering words at all. I've been trying to learn German for years and I still struggle with my tiny vocabulary.

[pathos]

24,400 Cough, cough. english speaker


Alt and his gf have way bigger vocabs than me but i always thought mine was above average...oh well

(If i knew the word for a place you go to kill yourself i would go there )

This post has been edited by Pathos: 03 December 2010 - 08:47 AM

[drinksinbars]

i had 38,100 which is ok considering i usually never get past swear words on a day o day basis

[Silencer]

MTS, on 03 December 2010 - 07:12 AM, said:

Gothos, on 03 December 2010 - 06:39 AM, said:

I'm terribly embarrassed. 22,300 words (second language, never been to an english-speaking country). Most of the words I didn't know I've seen for the first time in my life. Do they even mean anything?
Prurient?
Funambulist? what is that, a funny ambulance driver?
Malapropism?
What he fuck, ladies and gentelmen?

PS. Just took the test again, had some different words, 25,300. Not entirely accurate on one use, is it?

A funambulist is a tightrope walker, a malapropism is when you misuse a homonym, like 'bare with me', and prurient has something to do with itching? I didn't know it, but the Latin word for 'to itch' is similar.

Anyway, English is the most overburdened language, there are thousands of words that only armchair-bound academics will have heard of, much less be able to use in conversation. At this level I don't think vocabulary is a sign of intelligence so much as a sign of how widely you have read and how much you can remember.

Pretty sure it wasn't intended as a test of intelligence, just vocabulary - case in point, most of the people who've posted in this thread are very intelligent (just for being able to read and appreciate Malazan, lol, let alone their other capabilities) - and even then, I'd suspect it's more of an e-peen measure than anything else, lol.

[Adjutant Stormy~]

I wish the list would vary, so that you could take the test multiple times, striving of course for statistical rigor, and not ego. By no means ego.

[Tsundoku]

40,600. A veritable plethora, although rather ... selective ... in present company. Remember though, with vocabulary it's not the size but how well you use it.

It still puts me about 40,500 or so ahead of most of the people I work with. Most of theirs are limited to 4 letters.

This post has been edited by Sombra: 03 December 2010 - 02:47 PM

[cerveza_fiesta]

26,300

meh. Not really surprising. I didn't know half of page 2.

English first language.

[Aptorian]

D, on 03 December 2010 - 03:48 AM, said:

27200... and it's my first language!

HA!

27,400

Well... seems we are both stupid people.

In all fairness half of those really tricky ones I learned from reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I guffawed when I saw tatterdemalion in there.

[ansible]

Fuliginous? Thanks, Severian.

33,700, native speaker. Honestly, I expected better, so I'm calling bullshit on some of those words.

[Astra]

20.800 only
Some 5-6 words I knew once but don't remember right now the meaning.
Oh well. I bet it is 10 times more than my second language, Hebrew.

[Aptorian]

The positive thing is that insults in Hebrew sound so much cooler.

[ansible]

Ok, I tried again. 36,400. And let me tell you, learning 3000 words in ten minutes is NOT easy.

[Bauchelain the Evil]

29,300

Not bad for a non-native speaker.

The hardest one was definetly imbroglio. I had no idea what it meant

[Leo]

I doubt this is entirely accurate, but I got 33k and English is my first language. Ah, well.
My English skills surpass those of pretty much everyone I know, but my vocabulary is absolutely horrible. I already knew this.

Edit: I scrolled up and looked at a couple more posts. I now feel happy with my results. Also, tatterdemalion was... just great.

This post has been edited by Leo: 03 December 2010 - 08:02 PM

[Vengeance]

37900 and I am a native english speaker. I feel inferior.

[stone monkey]

45,000 apparently. And English is my first language... To be fair though, my vocabulary is rather.... um.... sesquipedalian

btw I didn't know what "sparge" meant... I do now

Of course, given the OED contains somewhere in the region of 500,000 words, this would appear to mean my vocabulary only contains about an 11th of them. Must try harder I guess

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 03 December 2010 - 09:12 PM

[Avatar]

Just 12000, native Dutch speaker. (Did get some of best grades in 'highschool' for English.) Respect for the people who have it as a second language and still score above 20.000!

[Aptorian]

I think I remember hearing that there are hundreds of thousands of dead words in the English language, which is more words than there are dead or active words in the Danish vocabulary. Which is crazy.

But then again, there is a lot of nuance in the English language that the Danish one just doesn't seem to care about. Instead many of our words have two, three or more meanings, depending upon the intonation and endings.

[stone monkey]

English kinda works that way too. Otherwise we wouldn't be so fond of puns.

The OED has an express policy of never taking a word out, so there's bound to be a lot of them that aren't used any more (I mean, it's been around for well over a century) I think the real reason for the English language's... um... embonpoint... is that we're not shy about stealing words from other languages. It comes from being the Colonial power, I guess; if the natives had a word for something the British colonisers hadn't seen before, we'd have it. And there just isn't that movement here (or in the US or Australia or New Zealand or Canada or anywhere else they speak English as a first language), like there is for both French and German, of linguistic purists trying to purge the language of foreign loan words.

[AlanH]

My vocab is approximately 45000 according to that. Recognised at least "a" definition of every word on that list. I'm fluent in English and French (English being my mother tongue), my mother teaches English, and I read a ridiculous number of books a year, so somewhere in amongst all this I learned quite a bit of English...