How many of these words do you know?
Twenty words, five possible meanings each. Pick the closest one. No timer, no account, and nothing stored.
About four minutes. You can stop at any point and score what you have done.
Before you start
- Your score is the number of words you got right, out of twenty. It is not an estimate of how many words you know. Tests that give you a vocabulary size — "you know 27,400 words" — get there by sampling words from frequency bands and projecting a total with a statistical model. That projection is a claim about a population, and our reference sample is zero people, so we are not going to make it. Why our number and theirs are not the same kind of number.
- This task may work without sight. Every word and every option is text, announced in a live region as the items advance, and every control is a real button reachable by keyboard. We have not tested it with a screen reader and will not claim it works until we have — that is a description of what the page does, not a promise about what your software will make of it.
- Five options, so a blind guess is right about one time in five. Over twenty words that is four correct from luck alone, and we publish it so you can subtract it rather than being sold the whole number as knowledge.
- The words are fixed, not generated. Take it twice and you will see the same twenty. That is a real limitation and it is different from our other tests — it is set out in full below.
Word meaning test in progress
Which is closest in meaning to
Your result
What that says about the task
What this task tested
Whether you recognise what a word means when you see it, across a range running from everyday words to rare ones. It is one task in the Verbal Comprehension domain, and in the reference kit we work from vocabulary is the marker test for that factor — not a proxy for it, the thing itself.
This test is one of the seven arms of the Cognitive Fingerprint. It was not, until v2.0 — the Fingerprint shipped with four arms and arms were added in one deliberate version change once the domain set was complete, rather than one at a time, because the scores in a shared link travel in the link and adding an arm changes the answer a sent link resolves to. A link made when there were four arms is still read on the four-arm scale and keeps its number. How the number is built, and what the version marker does.
What this did not measure
It says nothing about how well you use words — whether you write clearly, argue well, or find the right word when you need it. Recognising a meaning and producing one are different abilities, and the reference kit separates them into different factors with different marker tests.
It also says nothing about how many words you know in total. Twenty words is twenty words.
How much should you trust this number? What moved it that is not your vocabulary, what it legitimately supports, and what it cannot.
Things that moved this number that are not your vocabulary
- Which words we picked. This is the big one, and it is bigger here than on any other test we run. Swap five of the twenty for rarer words and the same person scores lower; swap them for commoner ones and they score higher. The word list is the difficulty, and ours was chosen by hand.
- Reading, schooling and language history. Vocabulary tracks how much you have read and in what, more visibly than anything else we measure. If English is not your first language this test is measuring your English, not your ability to learn words, and no arrangement of it would fix that.
- Whether you have seen this test before. The words are fixed. A second attempt is partly a memory test for the first attempt.
- Your day. Less than on a timed task, but not nothing — a word you would recognise rested is a word you can stare past when you are tired.
Should you believe this number?
What it legitimately supports: that on these twenty words, today, you picked this many correct meanings out of five options each. That is a real measurement of a real thing and it is narrow on purpose. It also gives you something to compare against — yourself, though less usefully here than elsewhere, because the words do not change.
What it cannot support: any statement about how you compare with other people, and any statement about the size of your vocabulary. We have measured nobody, our reference sample is zero, and the second claim would need a calibrated word list that ours is not.
Why your vocabulary score will not match another site's →
The rule we used is published in full further down this page, including the chance rate, the exclusions and the band boundaries. If you disagree with the number you can check the working and find where we differ — that is the point of publishing it.
Every word, and what you picked
Two questions, if you have twenty seconds
We are trying to find out whether explaining a result is worth doing at all. Nothing is recorded except which buttons you press — no result, no identifier, nothing that could be traced to you. There are no wrong answers here and nothing follows from your choice.
1 · Did the explanation above make sense to you?
2 · Did it tell you anything about yourself?
Recorded. Thank you — that is genuinely useful.
Comparing this run with another one
This comparison is weaker here than on our other tests, and we would rather say so than let it look stronger than it is. The words do not change between runs, so a second attempt carries memory of the first. It is still worth seeing the size of the swing.
You do not have to write it down. Name the conditions for the run you just did and we will hold it on this screen while you do a second one.
What next
- Why your vocabulary score will not match another site's — vocabulary size tests and this one are not two attempts at the same number
- How many words do you know? — why published estimates of vocabulary size disagree by a factor of twenty, and why this test gives a count instead of one
- Build your Cognitive Fingerprint — the seven tests that make a shape, and the number they produce
- The instrument register — every test here with its version, its rung and its reference sample
- How BrainScore works — the norming ladder and where we sit on it
How this is scored
Published in full, because a score you cannot check is not worth much.
The task
- Twenty words. For each one you pick, from five options, the word closest in meaning.
- They are presented in the order we judged them, commonest first, so the test gets harder rather than jumping about.
- The five options are shuffled on every item, so the position of the answer is never learnable.
- There is no timer. Nothing about your score depends on your device, your connection, or whether this tab was in the background.
Where the words come from, and the part of this we are weakest on
We wrote the list. It is not taken from anyone else's test, and it is not calibrated against a word-frequency corpus. The items in the reference kit are licensed, and reproducing them would be both a licensing breach and a way of quietly making our test somebody else's.
The ordering from commonest to rarest is our judgement, not a measurement, and that is the single softest thing on this page. A calibrated list would place each word against how often it actually appears in written English, and ours does not. Until it does, the difficulty curve is an opinion held by the people who wrote it — which is why the result reports a count and never a projection.
Some options are chosen to look like the target word rather than to mean anything near it — for one item every option begins with the same three letters. That is deliberate: recognising the shape of a word is not the same as knowing it, and an option set that never tests the difference would flatter you.
The scoring rule
- Your score is the number of words you answered correctly, out of the number you saw. That is the whole rule. There is no weighting by rarity, no partial credit, and no hidden modifier.
- A wrong answer is wrong. It does not subtract, and it does not end the test.
- Chance is published rather than hidden: five options means a blind guess is right about one time in five, so roughly four of twenty come from luck alone.
- The result also lists every word with what you picked, because a count with no items behind it cannot be argued with.
Exclusion rules — when an attempt does not count
- A run stopped early is scored on the items you completed, and the result says how many that was. It is not scored as though the remaining words were wrong.
- A run abandoned by closing the tab is not scored at all; nothing is kept.
- There is no hidden-tab rule here, and that is not an oversight. Our two timed instruments void an attempt if the tab is hidden, because browsers slow timers in background tabs and that hands you a longer look than the task allows. This task has no timer, so hiding the tab changes nothing about it. We would rather say that than carry a rule that does nothing.
- Looking a word up would obviously change the number, and we cannot detect it and are not going to try. Nothing here is worth cheating for, and building surveillance into a test that stores nothing would cost more than it could ever be worth.
The bands
| Correct of 20 | What the result says about the task |
|---|---|
| 18–20 | The rare end of this list held as well as the common end |
| 14–17 | Comfortable well past the everyday words |
| 10–13 | The common half secure, the rare half intermittent |
| 6–9 | Above what guessing produces, on the commoner words |
| 0–5 | At or near what guessing alone produces |
These boundaries are a design decision, not an empirical finding. The bottom band is set where it is because five options over twenty items puts pure chance at about four. The rest divide the list at the points where we judged it turns over from everyday to rare — and since that ordering is our judgement rather than a measurement, so are these lines. When real data exists they will be revisited, and the version will increment when they are. The norming ladder, and where we are on it, is published in full.
What we do with your answers
Nothing. The test runs entirely in your browser. Your answers and your result are never sent to us and never stored. Closing the tab destroys them. The privacy notice covers this in full.
Sources
- Educational Testing Service. Kit of Factor-Referenced Cognitive Tests (1976 Edition). ets.org — the factor list, in which V — Verbal Comprehension is marked by five vocabulary tests and is one of six separate verbal factors, and the "research instruments not intended for use in selection or counseling" statement.