Wordspan: Vocabulary Test

How many English words do you actually know? Not a guess — a measurement, in about three minutes. HOW IT WORKS You see 80 words, one at a time, and answer whether you know each one. Sixty are real, drawn evenly from ten frequency bands: from the thousand most common words in English down to ranks 35,000–45,000, where most native speakers start to run out. The other twenty don't exist. WHY THE INVENTED WORDS MATTER They're not a trick. Every vocabulary test has the same problem: people over-claim, some more than others, and there is no way to tell from the answers alone. The invented words measure exactly that. Claim a few and your score is corrected down by the same rate; claim more than a third of them and the test tells you it can't be scored and asks you to try again. Websites that ask the same questions mostly skip this check. It's the difference between a number and a number worth…