English vocabulary test: how many words do you know?
Tick the words you know to estimate your English vocabulary size.
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- Round 1
- Round 2
- Round 3
- Meaning check
Choosing words: round 1 / 3 — Next: a quick meaning check on a few words
Tick the words you know
Tick a word if you know at least one of its meanings. If you're not sure, leave it blank. Some items are not English words, so choose carefully.
Then untick the words you don't know or aren't sure of.
0 words selected
Words you leave unticked count as words you don't know.
The test needs no login. Your answers are processed in your browser; progress is saved temporarily in this browser so you can continue if the page reloads.
How does the test work?
- Tick the words you know.
- Answer a few questions about meaning.
- Get your vocabulary estimate and suggestions for what to learn next.
What does the result mean?
- It is an estimate with a range, not an exact count.
- It counts word families: a base word and its common forms count once (happy, happily, unhappy).
- The vocabulary level is a reference based on vocabulary size alone, not your overall English level.
- Knowing a word when you read it is not the same as using it: the words you use when speaking and writing are usually fewer.
Questions
What counts as knowing a word?
You know a word if you understand at least one of its meanings when you see it, even if you can't use it yourself yet. If it only looks familiar or you're not sure what it means, leave it unticked.
Why are some words not real?
It is easy to tick words that only look familiar. Some items in the lists are made up; how many of them you tick shows how often that happens, and the estimate is corrected for it. Ticking more than a tenth of them makes the estimate less certain, and more than a quarter means we don't give a number.
Is the result accurate?
It is an estimate with a likely range, not an exact count. It is closest when you tick only the words whose meaning you're sure of. How it is calculated is explained under Method and sources below.
Is my result saved?
Nothing is sent to our server and nothing is saved to an account. While you take the test, your progress is saved temporarily in this browser so you can continue if the page reloads; it is deleted when you see your result or start again.
Is this my CEFR level?
No. The reference level comes from your vocabulary size alone, using Milton & Alexiou's mapping. A real CEFR level also depends on grammar, listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Method and sources
A Yes/No checklist with made-up words, scored over 25 frequency bands of 1,000 word families each.
Round 1 has 2 words from every frequency band and 8 made-up words. Rounds 2 and 3 focus on the 3–6 bands around your level: 60 more words and 16 more made-up words, split between the two rounds.
The share of made-up words you tick corrects for guessing. Each band's result is smoothed so that a rarer band never scores higher than a more common one, and the bands are added up. The range is a 90 % bootstrap interval, never narrower than ±10 %.
Up to 5 meaning checks only flag possible over-ticking; they do not change the number.
In a simulation of 1,920 tests by honest takers, the range contained the true vocabulary size in about 87–89 % of runs, with a typical width of ±13 %. This is a simulation, not a measurement on real people; answering by ticking a list has not been re-measured yet.
The reference level uses the number of word families you know among the 5,000 most common (Milton & Alexiou 2009); C1 starts at 6,000 word families and C2 at 9,000. That table counts lemmas rather than word families, so the level is approximate.
Sources
- Meara's Yes/No vocabulary tests with pseudowords (X_Lex, Meara & Milton 2003; V_YesNo, Meara & Miralpeix) and the guessing correction compared by Huibregtse, Admiraal & Meara (2002), Language Testing 19(3).
- Brysbaert et al. (2016), “How many words do we know?”, Frontiers in Psychology 7:1116.
- BRAVE vocabulary test, myvocab.info (Golovin): results of native and non-native online takers.
- Milton & Alexiou (2009), in Richards et al. (eds), Vocabulary Studies in First and Second Language Acquisition, Palgrave, 194–211: vocabulary size and the CEFR.
- Nguyen & Nation (2011), RELC Journal 42(1), 86–99: a bilingual Vocabulary Size Test with Vietnamese third-year English majors.
- Dang (2020): the Updated Vocabulary Levels Test with 442 Vietnamese first-year non-English-major students.
- Nation (2012), The Vocabulary Size Test: information and specifications: word families and how many words texts need.
Word frequencies: wordfreq (Robyn Speer), CC BY-SA 4.0. Definitions: Princeton WordNet. Our word list is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.