Testyourvocab

So you want to show off the size of your dictionary? Look no further than this quick test, which will work out how many words you know.

Just click the word that’s closest in meaning to travel (n.).

As you play we’ll narrow down the estimate of your vocabulary size, and you can stop whenever you get bored.

100 word vocabulary test

Right now we think you know about 2,000 words (between 400 and 200,000).

You can also administer the test for someone else. For more reliable results, try asking them to define the word or give an example. If they are not sure of a word then just click an answer at random.¹

How it works

We can’t test you on every English word – there are hundreds of thousands of them.

Instead we can turn this into a statistical problem, by asking how likely you are to know a given word. If there’s a 5% chance you’ll recognise any word in English, that means you know a twentieth of the dictionary, and we can figure out your vocabulary size from there.

Ideally we’d show you a small sample of words, chosen at random, and see wh

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