Test your vocab: The Blog

(Please also see the main blog page, with all entries.)

Summary of results

10 May 2013

Now that we've reached over two million completions of our vocabulary survey, we thought it would be a good time to consolidate our biggest findings in a single post. All numbers here are rounded to make for nice "factoids", but link to the original blog entries with the raw data.

(Note that "native" here is short for "native speakers of English", or people who speak English as a first language, and "foreign" is short for "non-native learners of English." And remember that these statistics are based on self-selected survey participants who are the kind of people who take vocabulary tests on the Internet, and not necessarily representative of the population as a whole.)

• Most adult native test-takers range from 20,000–35,000 words
• Average native test-takers of age 8 already know 10,000 words
• Average native test-takers of age 4 already know 5,000 words
• Adult native test-takers learn almost 1 new word a day until middle age
• Adult test-taker vocabulary growth basically stops at middle age

• The most common vocabulary size for foreign test-takers is 4,500 words
• Foreign test-takers tend to reach over 10,000 words by living abroad
• Foreign test-takers learn 2.5 new words a day while living in an English-speaking country

• Native adult vocabulary size appears to be principally determined by
  reading habits between ages 4 and 15
• For native vocabulary growth, reading fiction specifically is just as important as reading in general
• Native test-taker children who read "lots" learn 4 new words a day
• Native test-taker children who read "somewhat" learn 2.5 new words a day
• Native test-taker children who read "not much" learn 1.5 new words a day

Thanks to everyone who's taken the survey, shared it with others, and helped make this all possible! But we're not done yet — so please continue to share the site, and we'll continue to perform new analysis as more data comes in.