Hello Lovely Readers,
Just a quick post today as I really should be doing my work. Some of you might have seen this around Tumblr recently, but I thought I would share it in case you haven’t. I love taking random quizzes and test, but more than that I love to see how I compare to other people (I may be a little competitive). So when I saw that with 3 steps I could test my vocabulary as well as see some of the statistics about everyone who has completed the test, I was in. You can go to the test by clicking on the link here. It’s shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes (probably closer to 5).
When you finish it will show you something like the above, with the estimated size of your vocabulary (yes that is my score). According to their previous participants, ” Most native English adult speakers who have taken the test fall in the range 20,000–35,000 words.” And “foreign learners of English, we’ve found that the most common vocabulary size is from 2,500–9,000 words.” So this lets you know where you fall. Then if you are a nerd like me, you can click through on their links to see graphs with percentiles and ages so you can get a better idea of how you compare to others. They do point out that these scores may be inflated, as what sort of people voluntarily take a vocabulary test online? Probably the self-selecting sample is biased towards those with large vocabularies. I will be curious to see if they release anymore statistics about levels of education and amount of book reading, as these are things they ask you about.
So are any of you going to test your vocabulary, if so how did you do? Do you think reading has helped improve your vocabulary? I know it has for me, as there are a lot of words that I know but I have no idea how to pronounce!
Until next time,
Frances and Lynne 
I got 23,700. I wouldn’t say that reading widely necessarily increases your vocabulary beyond the average for native speakers though. Rarely do I read a book where I don’t know what a word means. I think that’s because authors are using easier words nowadays. I think you’re an exception to the rule, Lynne, because you actively learn new words.
Frances
I would have to agree that authors are using easier words. I think between all the Shakespeare, some of the foreign and older authors, I still look up new words (Rowling is great for learning new words). Also I had to study lots of archaic words for the GRE (a test to get into Post grad in the USA). And you know me, I love strange words!!
That is so impressive, I feel at times I barely speak English! Learning foreign languages is just not something that comes easy for me, but I keep trying, and I find that they help my vocabulary as well. Or maybe just the ones that are close, like the other romance languages!
So interesting! English is my third language so I was interested to see that I scored within the ‘Native English’ speaker scores!