What happened to the U Ghent's online vocabulary test?

January 15, 2024 3:23 PM

A few years back, Metafilter introduced me a great free online test of vocabulary size hosted by a research group at the University of Ghent, vocabulary.ugent.be. Looks like that site has been down for a while. Is the test still available anywhere else?

This test used an interesting and original format, where the subject was shown a bunch of letter strings and had to identify which were English words and which were bogus. I'm aware of this alternative test that uses checklists, but I always liked that the U Ghent version generated a new wordlist each time and actively tested your familiarity without relying on self-report.

The research group's page appears to have been taken down, but does anyone know if the test is still available anywhere, or if there are other tests based on a similar model?

posted by Bardolph to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

This one looks to be quite similar.

(Though I will say, having tried it, that there was definitely one word they classified as real that definitely does not exist - a simple misspelling - and I'm pretty sure some of their "made-up" words in fact to exist, though perhaps a bit non-standard. But I couldn't go back to the previous word-lists to double check on that, so I can't say with 100% certainty. )

This is in the same vein, though asks for matching definitions & doesn't have the fake words.
posted by flug at 10:19 PM on January 15

I just tried both and found that the second one is the better test. The first gave me errors similar to flug's with words that I know exist, e.g., "deem" being considered made-up.
posted by jadepearl at 2:36 AM on January 18