lexicist

How many English words do you know?

Twelve questions measure it against a study of 221,268 people. Then you get three new words a day, picked from the edge of what you know.

Measure my vocabulary Free. No sign-up to see your number.

Drag the line until the words stop looking familiar.

magazine

Known by 99% of Americans

Known by almost everyoneKnown by almost no one

Fig. 1. The 61,858 words in the Ghent University study, one point each, in order of how many Americans know them.¹

Two American 20-year-olds can be 25,000 words apart.

The bottom 5% know about 27,000 words and the top 5% about 52,000.² Nobody tells you which end you’re near. Lexicist does: your word count, your percentile, the margin of error and one of five titles.

ReaderWordsmithLogophilePhilologistLexicist

25,000 words

27,000bottom 5%

42,000average

52,000top 5%

Fig. 2. Estimated vocabulary of American 20-year-olds. The curve is a sketch through the study’s three figures.²

Left alone, adults add about one word every two days.

That’s the average between 20 and 60.² Lexicist gives you three a day, picked from words you have about an even chance of knowing, so you aren’t paging through ones you learned in school.

On your own15 words

With Lexicist90 words

Day 1Day 30

Fig. 3. New words over 30 days. The top row is the average adult rate. The bottom rows are Lexicist’s daily list, if you open it every day.

Every word you keep becomes a stone.

The stones pile into your cairn, rarest at the bottom. White means new, gray means practiced, black means you know it by heart. Each word you master adds to your total and shows how many people you just passed.

Fig. 4. A cairn, the pile of stones hikers leave to mark a path. Yours marks the words you’ve kept.

Forget a word and its stone falls.

Practice spaces out the quizzes:⁴ the day you keep a word, the next day and a week later. Miss it and the stone stays down until you answer right. We quiz you because students who tested themselves on a text remembered 61% of it a week later, and students who reread it remembered 40%.³

Fig. 4, one week later. The top word didn’t hold.

Where you’ll notice it first

In a meetingquagmire“The merger became a quagmire.”a difficult, tangled situation
In a bookcrepuscular“Deer are crepuscular animals.”active at twilight
In a draftotiose“The second paragraph is otiose.”serving no useful purpose
At dinnermisanthrope“He’s a cheerful misanthrope.”someone who dislikes people

Every word comes with its history.

checkmate

/ˈt͡ʃɛkmeɪt/ · noun

a final, winning move

“That offer was checkmate.”

1 of 3

Persian shah mat, the king is helpless. Arabic and French carried the phrase along the same road as the game.

Persian → Arabic → French → English

Why the stories? In a 1969 experiment, people who wove lists of nouns into stories later recalled 93% of them, and people who rehearsed them recalled 13%.⁵ They wrote their own stories. Ours are true.

Measure my vocabulary

We read 901 App Store reviews of a popular word app.

Three complaints kept coming back, so Lexicist is built around them.

Too easy
We measure you first. Your daily words start at the edge of what you know, and one tap marks any word you already have.
Made-up words
Every etymology is checked against Wiktionary, with the link on the word’s page.
Charged after the trial
Lexicist is free for now. There’s no trial to forget about, and we don’t ask for a card.

Twelve words from now, you’ll know your number.

Measure my vocabulary Free. No sign-up to see your number.