Bryndza is Central European/Eastern European product, it even means "poverty" in Polish. Wikisources say it's of Romanian/Italian origin.

But if it's commonly used in a certain language, it becomes a native word.

Their results page for different languages have some interesting plots, especially when you compare languages:

- https://www.myvocab.info/pl/results-pl

- https://www.myvocab.info/en/results-en

So based on that data:

- EN has over a million known words and is growing fast, a 12 year old knows around 10k words

- PL has around 140k words in popular dictionaries, a 12 year old knows around 40k words

I wonder how much of that is sample size and grammar interpretation (definition of word) related.

Wish the full results were available to look over. I scored 23,300, but they only share the reliability data:

* Correctly avoided fake words (5/6)

* Answered word-meaning checks correctly (6/6)

The fake word I missed was 'ventrel', but come on, 'ventral' (with an 'a') is a word. That's just mean! Anyway, it would be fun to see (and argue about) which of the words I didn't recognize are real.

Unfairly discriminatory | Mostly positive | publicly accepted | Socially Neutral

It looks like a reasonable idea to me and not stupid at all.

That is a dumb assertion. By definition, ALL English words come up in written word, and it's hard to imagine a case where they don't come up in spoken word as well.

Being able to correctly define useful words would be a better test of knowledge. Just because you “know” some words doesn't mean you really understand what they mean.

Bah, it's just a test for “book smart” people to feel good about themselves. One has to feel good about that time investment, I guess.

On a side note, I don't think using too many uncommon words is a good thing. It just obscures the meaning of what you are trying to say unnecessarily. But this is a status marker and a pretty effective way to create tribal boundaries; people love to feel smart without too much effort.