Pretty fun.

I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow.

Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.

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mpeg 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It'd also be a lot less awkward to go through 100 words if it had keyboard shortcuts (1-4 for the words, enter to submit) and if they fixed the layout shift jank

	▲	goodmythical 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		wouldn't even let me tab to sumbit, you had to click, tab through each following option, then to submit, but then you had to tab again to confirm the submission!

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RicoElectrico 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It estimated 74k words for me, but I feel this might be inflated; much of the time when I didn't know the answer - I could vibe guess it just as you did it. The distractor answers weren't convincing enough. For starters, when an answer was based on deconstructing the word into common English words, that ruled it out. After all, if it was, then it wouldn't have been obscure.

A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard. From the exams I know (excluding those whose nature precludes it, such as based on calculation or rote memorization) the only that does this brutally well is LEK (Polish medical graduate exam). It's nigh impossible to vibe guess it at more than random chance for someone outside the field.

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superjan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What I also noticed: when there are two contradictory definitions to choose from, it is usually one of those two.

For all its shortcomings, this was part of the fun, deducing the likely correct answer when you see a word for the first time.

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datsci_est_2015 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah I also got exactly 74k. Stuff like “xylologist” I guessed had to do with vegetation because of “xylem”, whereas xylophone player was too on the nose. Then again, maybe knowing xylem in the first place makes 74k reasonable.

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9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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fittingopposite 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Haha. Yeah I figured Xylo- (wood) + sth. related to mono-poly so wood-seller made sense. Never have heard of this word before

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pclmulqdq 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the test was vibe coded, because a xylologist is someone who studies wood, not someone who sells wood. I am not sure if "xylolgist" was the exact word, though.

xylo- = wood; -logy = study

Indeed from M-W: "a branch of dendrology dealing with the gross and the minute structure of wood"

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fittingopposite 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Seems to be a hapax legomenon https://www.oed.com/dictionary/xylopolist_n "OED's only evidence for xylopolist is from 1656, in the writing of Thomas Blount, antiquary and lexicographer."

	▲	pclmulqdq 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That test had several hapax legomena on it, so it would make sense.

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rationalist 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

66k for me, but I didn't get that word, instead I got ones like Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Flibbertigibbet, and Brobdingnagian... which the latter two interestingly do show up in my keyboard's word completion suggestions.

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mpeg 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I guessed that one right because xylophone player sounded like a trap.

I don't understand how they rank words though, some extremely common words like xenophobia were ranked as high as much more obscure ones.

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_diyar 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

in casual use you might also be able to guess it from context, so i think it’s a wash

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scubbo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!

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vova_hn2 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> A tangent: writing distractors for multiple choice questions is hard.

In case of online quiz you can have a "competition" between distractors:

1. start by having much more distractors than needed and pick randomly

2. for each measure the probability of it getting clicked (clicks/times it's shown)

3. show the most frequently clicked distractors more often

	▲	RicoElectrico 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, as I researched the topic of multiple choice exam design, seems the rule of thumb is to reject outright any distractors that are chosen by less than 5% of test takers.

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onionisafruit 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It would have been nice to have an “i don’t know” button. Instead I decided to select the first option for words I didn’t know instead of trying to figure them out. Although when I got to the final group I couldn’t resist trying to figure them out. It estimated 61k for me.

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vova_hn2 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so.

Having an answer counted as incorrect, just because I've accidentally touched the screen of the phone? I would absolutely hate that.