English vocabulary test

Press Start the test at the top of this page to find out. You get a number such as “about 6,500 words” with a likely range. It counts words you can recognise and explain, not only the ones you use when you speak. A word here means a headword: walk, walks and walked count once.

Yes, it is free. At the end you leave your email address to see your result, and we send you a copy, along with 50% off Slova when it launches. Your answers are marked in your browser; we keep only your email, your result and what you choose to tell us about your goals.

Researchers who tested almost a million people (Brysbaert and colleagues, 2016) estimated that a typical 20-year-old American knows about 42,000 lemmas, which is about 11,100 word families by their count. Most adults fell between 27,000 and 52,000 lemmas. This test stops at the 20,000th most common word, so it cannot show a number that high.

It depends on what you want to do. According to Paul Nation, about 3,000 word families cover around 95% of everyday spoken English, which is enough for most conversations. To follow films and unscripted speech without help you need about 6,000 to 7,000 for 98% coverage, and to read newspapers and novels about 8,000 to 9,000. Fluency also needs grammar and a lot of practice.

They catch guessing. Six of the 48 words on the two screens, about one in eight, look like English words but are not. If you tick some of them, your other ticks are less reliable, so we lower the number to match. If you tick most of them, the test gives no number at all. Research tests such as LexTALE (Lemhöfer and Broersma, 2012) use made-up words for the same reason.

A tick only shows that a word looks familiar. So the test brings back up to 12 of the words you ticked: six with four meanings to choose from, and six in a sentence with a gap, often a collocation or a phrasal verb. When you get them right, your ticks count in full. When you do not, the number goes down to match.

No. A vocab exam usually tests a fixed list of hard words for a school or admissions test. This test takes words from every level, from very common to rare, to estimate how many words you know in total. It does not predict an exam score. If you are preparing for an exam, use the result to see where your vocabulary stops, then study that exam’s own word list.

Treat the range as the answer, not the single number. In simulations with artificial test takers who answered honestly, the estimate was off by 9% to 21% on average for true sizes between about 5,000 and 14,000 words, and the likely range held the true size about 8 times in 10. It is less exact for small vocabularies, and it comes out about 20% low if you leave words you know unticked. The accuracy section above has the details.

A headword. The forms of a word (walk, walks, walked, walking) count once. Forms ending in -ly, -ness, -less, -ful, -ment and -able count with the word they come from. Names, abbreviations and phrases are not counted. Other tests count word families, so their numbers are not directly comparable.

Yes. The words are drawn at random from a bank of 154, so a second try repeats some of them. Wait a few weeks and do not look words up in between, or the result will show what you looked up, not what you knew.

Start with the words you missed, most common first, because they are worth the most. Learn a few a day, see each one in a sentence, say it out loud and meet it again after a day, a week and a month. The English word of the day gives you one useful word with a picture and examples.

A vocabulary test counts words. A level test, like our English level test, checks grammar, vocabulary and reading to estimate a CEFR level. A big vocabulary does not always mean a high level, because grammar and listening count too.