My vocabulary ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

... is estimated at 43,000 words.  I have discovered that, if I don't know a word, it is unlikely to be in the dictionary.  I like being able to search online, where I can usually find a definition somewhere.

Comments

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

I feel feeble; I only scored about 31,800. The thing I found interesting, though, is that the words I did not know were ones I would not generally encounter ANYwhere in the regular course of my communication. In fact, I gravely suspect I'd have to be reading a lot of classics from other eras to have enountered them. Another thing I noticed about the test, and this is a possible criticism, is that there were not very many technical or scientic terms (at least, this is my impression).

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

It did favor certain registers very heavily. While a lot of the words are ones I use readily, even the obscure ones, they do lean a lot on classics. The test is also pretty classist: it doesn't have the topic-specific words that blue-collar or rural folks would know but middle-class urbanites often would not.

Re: Yes...

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

In the meantime, it's a reminder for me to find some properly annotated copies of Dickens and such (footnotes! not endnotes) so I can actually read through them without getting too bogged down by the language and contextual references.

Re: Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Nicely annotated Shakespeare can be fun too.

Re: Yes...

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

I actually don't have much difficulty reading Shakespeare, oddly enough. :)