How Many Words Do You ACTUALLY Know?

0:00 – 11:00

The Vocabulary Showdown That Got Weirdly Competitive

A listener named Jake built a website called Vocab Owl after hearing the hosts debate vocabulary size on a previous episode. The site tests you on 100 words across five difficulty tiers: core basics (3,000 words), intermediate (7,000), advanced (10,000), expert (25,000), and grandmaster (40,000 obscure terms). Both hosts score remarkably close, with one at 73,400 words and the other at 72,250. The real entertainment comes from their wrong answers. One misses "zenith" (thinking it means highest point rather than strongest point), while the other stumbles on "zephyr" (confusing violent storm wind with gentle breeze). They both fail "unctuous," which doesn't mean delicious but rather excessively flattering, like an overeager salesperson. The word "innervate" trips them up because it means to drain energy, not fill someone with it. Heat innervates you, making you sluggish. The grandmaster tier becomes absurd. "Pogonotrophy" is the growing of a beard. "Yclept" is an archaic way to say "called" or "named." "Eucalagon" refers to a neighbor whose house is on fire, named after a character from the Iliad. One host admits owning multiple books with titles like "The Scrumptious Person's Guide to Perplexing Words," which finally pays dividends. The algorithm estimates vocabulary by checking how many words you know in each tier, then extrapolating. Knowing just one more grandmaster word shifted the final estimate by 1,000 words, demonstrating how rare knowledge at the top creates exponential scoring effects.