[microtonal]

I am Dutch, and the estimated vocabulary is 15,600 words. It's really humbling, but on the other side surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary. But I bet the distribution is not very similar to an American kid with a vocabulary of that size ;).

It's easy to notice the difference in vocabulary in practice. Native speaker's speech is much more varied.

Also, it's maybe good for native speakers to realize that someone who may seem a bit rude or dumb on the Internet may be a non-native speaker who has difficulty expressing him/herself.

[Dn_Ab]

This is actually not surprising since word Frequencies more or less follow a power law probability distribution. With a vocabulary of even 1,000 words you are very well covered. Anyone who engages in a discussion with words that are not very common is doing the very opposite of trying to communicate.

[barrkel]

I choose words on the basis of how precisely they convey my desired meaning - which may exist at multiple levels, eg using esoteric words when talking about esoteric words. It seems to me somewhat anti-elitist of you to decry those who enjoy taking such care.

(I scored 35,300; of the words I recognized only about six were ones I don't either read or use with some regularity. I read a fair amount of literature though.)

[jvdh]

The vocabulary you need for scientific discussions can't be measured in these kinds of tests, because it is really very specific. So your english vocabulary may stil be a bit bigger.

The words that are measure here are the words that you'd use in "general" conversation I guess.

[rhizome31]

> surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary

Not really surprising since most of English scientific vocabulary comes from greek or latin roots and is more or less the same in other European languages.