Vocabulary Test

It measures receptive vocabulary: whether you recognise a word’s meaning when you see it. That is different from the words you use yourself, which is usually a smaller set.

The 15 words sit in five levels of three. Level 1 words are ones nearly every adult reader knows. Level 5 words, like pusillanimous and pellucid, turn up mainly in older books and careful writing. Your result shows which level you cleared, not just a total.

Some options are built to trap people who half-know a word by its sound. Candid is not related to candied, and ephemeral is not the same word as ethereal. Recognising that is part of knowing a word well.

Vocabulary is one of the strongest single predictors of overall scores on traditional IQ tests. It is part of the Verbal Comprehension index on the Wechsler scales. Psychologists class it as crystallised intelligence: knowledge built up through reading, schooling and conversation.

That is also its weakness as a measure of reasoning. Vocabulary depends heavily on what you have read, the language you grew up with, and your education. Someone reading in a second language can be a brilliant reasoner and still miss rare English words.

Our full IQ test does the opposite. It uses no words at all and measures fluid reasoning: how you handle patterns and rules you have never seen before. Vocabulary shows what you have learned. The IQ test shows how you think on new problems.

Latin and Greek roots unlock a surprising number of hard words. Bene means well (benevolent, benefit). Loqui means to speak (loquacious, eloquent). Animus means spirit (pusillanimous, magnanimous). If you know one word in a family, you can often make a good guess at the others.

Be careful with sound-alikes. Rare words often look like common ones they have nothing to do with. When an option feels right only because it sounds similar, that is usually the trap.

The most reliable way is wide reading, especially of material slightly above your comfort level. Looking up an unknown word and then meeting it again within a few days does more than memorising lists. It will raise your score on tests like this one, which is a real gain in knowledge, but it does not change fluid reasoning.