How many words do you actually know?

Ten minutes. One honest number — and a map you can point at any book on the shelf.

The baseline test

Around a hundred words. Yes or no: do you know it?

That is the whole test. No essays, no multiple choice, no timer breathing down your neck — just a word on the screen and an honest answer. A few of the words are fakes: plausible-sounding non-words that cost you if you are generous with yourself. Ten minutes later you have a real answer.

No signup needed. Take the test first; decide later whether any of it is worth keeping. Your answers stay in your browser, and there is an Export button when you want a backup file of your own.
Why the fake words?
Self-rated vocabulary tests flatter everyone. Ours borrows the honesty check from the research versions: say yes to a word that does not exist, and the estimate adjusts downward. It is a small cruelty in service of a number you can defend at a dinner table.
What you get

A vocabulary size. An estimate of how many English words you command, drawn from how you did across the frequency bands.

A map. Your knowledge charted across 12,000 graded words, band by band, so you can see where your English thins out instead of guessing.

A frontier. The words just past what you know — the narrow strip where ten minutes a day actually moves the number. The 2,000 words every English speaker shares are assumed. Nobody drills you on "the."

Then the number does something
A vocabulary score by itself is a party trick. This one has a job. Point it at any book in the reading room and Vocabularium prints the exact words standing between you and that story — graded, defined from Webster's 1828, each shown in the sentence where the author used it. That is the reason the test exists.
Already know most of the list?
Then take the Frontier test next. Thirty questions on a staircase that climbs when you are right and steps down when you are wrong, probing out to rank 49,530 — well past the twelve-thousand list. Pass its twenty-word spot check and every word below your line is marked known in one stroke, so you never tick thousands of boxes by hand.
Begin

A number you will want to beat.

Ten minutes now; a shelf you can aim at for the rest of the year.

Take the baseline test   Or see what it does to a book