How this test works
What the test measures, how it measures it and what it does not say. Also: where the words come from and who set the bands in each of the three tests.
How a run goes
Sixty words pass on the screen, one at a time, and each carries a single question: do you know it or not. Nothing is timed — this is a question about recognition, not a memory exam, so take as long as you like.
For half of the words you claimed, the meaning is asked as well: four options, one correct. That separates a word that merely looks familiar from a word you actually know, and half of the score rests on that verified half.
What the invented words are for
Twenty of the sixty do not exist in the language of the test. They are built to its sound and structure rules but appear in no dictionary; claiming one shows how far your other claims can be trusted, and costs you points.
The «Honesty» line on the result screen is exactly that multiplier. No warning pops up mid-run, and that is deliberate: seeing it would make you more careful in the second half — that is, it would disturb the measurement precisely where it is being taken.
What counts as a word
There is no agreed answer to this, so we state ours. A word here is a dictionary headword — whatever the edition gave an entry of its own. An inflected form is never a separate item: case, number and tense are the same word.
A derivative, however, can be — and counts as a different word whenever the dictionary gave it its own entry. That decision is visible in the count: a dictionary that draws the line elsewhere would credit you with a different number of known words, and there is nothing to argue about — the argument about what a word is, is older than any test.
What the score does not say
No number of the form «you know N words» comes out of this, and we do not derive one: that arithmetic needs a model we do not have.
The score measures something narrower and more honest — how far your vocabulary reaches beyond the everyday layer.
What reaches the server
No account, no cookies, no personal data. Your score stays in your browser: who took the test, what they scored and in which order they answered is recorded nowhere.
The Turkish and Kazakh tests do send per-word counters: which word was shown, how many people claimed it, how many also picked the right meaning. Those are there to correct bands that a dictionary set. The Chechen test sends nothing at all — its bands were set by a native speaker, and they need no second witness.
Three tests, three different dictionaries
The instrument is one; the data is each test's own — the words come from different editions, and the difficulty bands were set in different ways.
Türkçe
781 words, all of them headwords of the Güncel Türkçe Sözlük of the Turkish Language Association (TDK); the meanings and options on screen are its definitions.
The four difficulty bands rest on three witnesses: the dictionary's own labels (dated, colloquial, dialectal), the word's frequency in a corpus, and whether it falls outside the everyday core of the language.
Нохчийн мотт
267 words from an open Chechen-Russian dictionary; the spelling of each was checked against the orthographic standard of the Chechen Academy of Sciences. Meanings are given in the language of this page rather than in Chechen: no Chechen-to-Chechen explanatory dictionary is openly available, so the meaning arrives through an intermediary language.
Here the bands were set by a native speaker going through the whole bank. The question was not about difficulty but about the speaker's own speech: «everyone says it, the young too» / «rarely said, mostly by older people» / «I know it but never hear it» / «I don't know it». Those four answers are the four bands. Difficulty is not asked directly because difficulty is a claim about somebody else's vocabulary: the words of one's childhood are honestly rated easy, and a whole era slides downward.
Қазақ тілі
157 words — headwords of the Dictionary of the Kazakh Literary Language, with its definitions as meanings and options. Several volumes are missing from the available edition, so words starting with п, р, с, ш, ы, і, ү, ө are several times rarer in this test: if you meet no word starting with «п», you are entitled to know it is not you.
The bands rest on the edition's own labels (dated, rare, bookish, dialectal) and on the word's frequency in a corpus.