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Based on the Vocabulary Size Test by Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington.

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English Vocabulary Size Test

How many English words do you know?

This test estimates how many English words you know. It uses the 100 words of the Vocabulary Size Test, sampled evenly from the 20,000 most frequent word families of English: five from every 1,000, from everyday words such as see to rare ones such as spatiotemporal.

Each question shows a word in a short sentence. Choose the meaning that fits it. If you have some idea, go with your best guess, since hunches often come from real but partial knowledge. Choose I don't know only when the word is new to you. The words and meanings are in English in every language version of the test, because it measures your English.

Question 1 of 100

copra: They supply copra.

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The Vocabulary Size Test was developed by Paul Nation of Victoria University of Wellington, first with David Beglar of Temple University Japan as a 140-item test reaching the 14,000th word family, then as parallel 100-item versions reaching the 20,000th. This page uses Version A of the 20,000 version, with its words, sentences and meanings as published. Each item is a word, a simple sentence that uses it without explaining it, and four short meanings written in easier words than the one tested.

The test counts word families: a word together with its inflected and derived forms, such as walk, walks, walked, walking and walker. Someone who knows one member of a family and the regular ways English builds words can usually understand the others when reading, which is why word families are the usual unit for measuring a reading vocabulary.

The 20,000 word families were ranked by how often they occur in the British National Corpus and divided into twenty bands of 1,000, and five words were taken from each band. Each word you get right therefore stands for 200 word families, and your score, the number right times 200, estimates how many of the 20,000 you know. There is no penalty for wrong answers. The words appear in a random order, which the test's author suggests, so that rare words are spread through the test rather than piled up at the end.

What is a vocabulary size good for? Research on reading suggests that when about 98% of the words in a text are familiar, roughly one unknown word in fifty, a reader can understand it without help. Nation estimated the vocabulary that gives 98% coverage: about 6,000 word families for children's films, 7,000 for spoken English, 8,000 for newspapers and 9,000 for novels. The levels in your result are set at those points and at the vocabulary sizes found in native speakers.

The test measures written receptive vocabulary: whether you recognise what a word means when you read it. It does not measure the words you use when you speak or write, your listening vocabulary or your reading skill as a whole, though vocabulary is a large part of reading.

Other word tests measure different things. The Vocabulary IQ Test turns synonym knowledge into an IQ score, the Word IQ Test estimates verbal IQ from how you pronounce unusual words, and the Black Vocabulary Test measures knowledge of 1970s Black American vocabulary.

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References

  • Coxhead, A., Nation, P., & Sim, D. (2015). Measuring the vocabulary size of native speakers of English in New Zealand secondary schools. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 50(1), 121-135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-015-0002-3
  • Nation, I. S. P., & Beglar, D. (2007). A vocabulary size test. The Language Teacher, 31(7), 9-13.
  • Nation, P. (2012). The Vocabulary Size Test [Information and specifications]. Victoria University of Wellington. https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/vocabulary-tests

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate is my estimate?

It is an estimate from a sample. Each of the 100 words stands for 200 word families, so a few lucky guesses or slips move the result by several hundred. Because wrong answers are not penalised, the test's author calls the score a slightly generous estimate; choosing I don't know instead of guessing pulls it the other way.

Should I guess or choose "I don't know"?

Guess whenever you have some feeling for the word. The test was designed to give credit for partial knowledge, and its author reports that scores come out lower when people can choose I don't know, because they choose it for words they half know. The original paper test has no such option; we added it so that you need not guess blindly at words you have never seen.

Why are the words in English in every language?

Because the test measures your English vocabulary. Bilingual versions with the meanings in the reader's first language also exist, but one study found that they give scores around 10% higher, so we use the English-only version for everyone.

How many words does a native speaker know?

In a New Zealand study of 243 native English-speaking secondary school students, the average on this test rose from about 10,800 word families at age 13 to about 13,400 at age 17, with a wide range at every age. The test's author gives a rule of thumb for young native speakers: take two or three years off their age and multiply by 1,000.

How long does the test take?

The author's guide allows around 30 minutes for the 100 items. There is no time limit: the test measures what you know, not how fast you answer, so take the time you need over each word.

English Vocabulary Size Test

Why Use This Quiz?

1. Know where you stand. One number tells you how large your English vocabulary is, whether you are learning the language or have spoken it all your life, and the level shows what kinds of text that vocabulary is enough for.

2. See what to learn next. Learners below about 8,000 word families gain the most from studying words deliberately and reading texts written for their level; beyond that, wide reading does most of the work. Take the test again after some months of reading or study, once you no longer remember the answers, to see how far you have come.