My baseline
scores were 194 on the Word Classification Test and a 51.4 on
the 600-word vocabulary test. My e-mail address is Robert N. Seitz
<rnseitz@netzero.net>.
However,
I wasn't content to stop there. No, indeedy.
As
a physicist, Ive never been a word buffnever worked
crossword puzzles or looked up words in the dictionary. For years,
my wife and I didnt own a dictionary. Id been taught
that vocabulary has the highest correlation (0.8) with IQ of any
mental measure. Since IQ cant be significantly enhanced,
I had assumed that vocabulary couldnt be significantly enhanced,
either. But then it occurred to me that Ive learned a lot
of new words since I was a teenager. Most people probably frequently
encounter words that challenge them. Many people try to expand
their vocabularies. I decided to see what would happen if I tried
it, too. I got the idea of trying to learn all the words in the
Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Granted: a dictionary might not
offer the best selection of useful words. You might, perchance,
have shuffled off this mortal coil and never reckoned yourself
the poorer for having failed to know that a basilium
is a basiliomycetum cell or that emmet
is an archaic word for ant. And dictionaries tend
to be heavily weighted with botanical and zoological terms.
However, it was the best list I could find at the time.
It took
about four weeks to type 10,000 single or multiple definitions
into the computer, plus another week to add comments and to check
the material for errors. (Some of the 10,000 definitions were
of words that I knew, but felt that I didn't know sufficiently
well.) After that, its hard to say, since the actual memorization
was largely done in stolen moments over a period of several months.
During that time, I added some words to my vocabulary. So how
well did it work? Well, folks, the jury is still out. I'm finding
that I'm forgetting some of these words if I don't look at them
periodically. Mnemonics work best e. g., "The carcajou chased
the kinkajou up the acajou." or "I harled a henequen
hawser into the hawse." The question is, will virtually all
of these words click into place after a few more bimestrial reviews?
If not, it would seem to me to support the contention that IQ
and vocabulary are closely correlated. If so, it might call that
contention into question. While, had I been a logophile, I might
have expanded my vocabulary, I probably wouldn't have expanded
it by 10,000 words.
[8-1-2000 Update:
I have just gone back to review these words after, perhaps,
a year away from them, and have found that, although I knew most
of them thoroughly a year and a half ago, I've forgotten many
of them (although they come back very quickly). On the other hand,
I just turned 71, so that may be playing a role in my retention
limitations. However, I have permanently learned several thousand
of them, and if I review them periodically, I may eventually remember
them all. Also, learning by re-reading these lists may not be
the best way to engrail these words in stone. Some words that
are similar, like babasu, babesia, and babirusa
can be difficult to keep straight.]
I
have set up a web page with this 10,100-word Thesaurus/Dictionary available on it for downloading.
Words in the Thesaurus are hyperlinked to words in the Dictionary,
so that you can check on their exact definitions after finding
them in the Thesaurus. The Thesaurus/Dictionary exists in two
versions: a Word 97 format and an HTML format. The hyperlinks
work in the Word 97 Thesaurus/Dictionary but they don't work in
the HTML rendition. In the meantime, I'll be glad to email copies
of this Dictionary/Thesaurus to anyone who wants them.
Extreme
Non-Linearity of the Two Tests in Their Upper Registers
Both tests seem to become very non-linear at their upper ends.
Although my dictionaries fail to list the number of entries they
contain, an entry count for the Webster's Collegiate and Random
House abridged dictionaries indicates that both dictionaries contain
about 68,000 entries. That means that my initial score of 194
on the Word Classification Test and 51.4 on the 600-Word Vocabulary
Test would correspond to a total vocabulary of about 58,000 dictionary-entries.
Expanding my vocabulary by another 10,000 words to all 68,000
dictionary-entries would only have raised those numbers to 198
on the Word Classification Test and to 57.8 on the 600-Word Vocabulary
Test (assuming that "quodrat" should really be "quadrat").
The remaining words on both tests are not to be found in an abridged
dictionary. Adding another 15,000 words to my internal lexicon
from the Random House Unabridged Dictionary would have afforded
me a perfect score of 200 on the Word Classification Test and
a 58.9 on the 600-Word Test. Only by annexing another 7,500 words
culled from my huge, 1930's Merriam-Webster's Second International
Unabridged Dictionary could I have gotten all the words on both
tests (except for the word "filemot", which is found
in, and perhaps only in, the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary).
This experiment suggests some interesting implications. Preliminary
estimates indicate that I would only have to learn about 22,500
additional words (15,000 + 7,500) to know all the relevant words
in the Webster's International Unabridged Dictionary. (By "relevant
words", I mean words other than additional names of rocks,
birds, animals, and botanical terms. I figure I've learned enough
of them already in the American Heritage Abridged Dictionary.)
Only then would I be able to get a perfect score (59.9) on the
600-word vocabulary test (assuming that "sandiver" is
the correct spelling of "sandever"). Twenty-two thousand,
five-hundred words are a lot of extra words to learn, but knowing
them all would give you a virtually total command of the English
language.
By contrast, Shakespeare used only 29,066 different words (including
proper names) in all his works, of which about 18,000 are root
words or lemmas. (However, his vocabulary may have been more exotic
than it sounds. There may be many common words like "basin",
"wallet", or "tatting" that Shakespeare wouldn't
have used.)
I am publishing these "10,100 most-difficult words in an
abridged dictionary" on my web page for easy download. These
words and their definitions require less than 2 megabytes of disk
space and don't take long to download. They are available as a
Word 97 file or in html format.
Scaling
of Total Vocabulary with IQ
One of the interesting implications of these musings is that the
average man/woman-in-the-street would probably know 25,000 to
35,000 dictionary entries. (Note that the dictionary includes
additional words like "here", "go", "schoolteacher",
and "Africa" that wouldn't be found on a vocabulary
test).
Opening the dictionary
to a set of randomly pre-selected pages and testing subjects with
IQ's in the neighborhood of 100 might establish a baseline measure
of absolute vocabulary. I think that this is a test that cries
out to be conducted. I think it would be important to know how
various capabilities, including vocabulary, scale with IQ. It
would be very easy to assemble a cohort of individuals, open an
abridged dictionary to several selected pages, and count the number
of words whose definitions they know. (Unlike a vocabulary test,
the dictionary has all the words.) I've speculated that total
vocabulary might be roughly proportional to the ratio IQ.
I have
prepared a Word Classification
Test Histogram
depicting the Word
Classification Test scoring frequencies that fall within each
five-point interval. I have also estimated a value for the standard-deviation-on-the-right,
using the top 100 scores, plus 30 of the older scores below the
current top 100. This has necessarily required assuming a value
for the mean. Although scores on this test might well be skewed
to the right, scores expressed as standard deviations are relatively
insensitive to variations in the assumed value for the mean. The
reason is that as the assumed mean score decreases, the standard
deviation increases, tending to stabilize the sigma-displacement
values. Accordingly, I have assumed a mean equal to the median
(now = 170). Table I shows these calculations and the resulting
value for the standard deviation (~11).
My personal
guesstimate regarding the meanings of these scores would be that
Fredrik Berchtold's perfect score of 200 on the Word Classification
Test would fall above the 1 in 100,000 level, and considering
the non-linearity of the test in relation to its last few questions,
could lie above the 1 in 1,000,000 threshold. There is reason
to believe that a score of 165 on the Word Classification Test
corresponds to a vocabulary at, or somewhat above, the 1 in 1,000
level.