No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 31
The tests below constitute a series designed to measure the breadth of your vocabulary using a multiple-choice format. These tests aim to measure your knowledge of English vocabulary insofar as it includes knowledge of synonyms.
Each test has 10 items. In each item, you will be given an English word. You will also be given five answer choices to choose from. There is only one correct answer. Your task is to choose the answer choice that is most similar in meaning to the English word.
These tests are an assessment of the ability to retrieve knowledge of the relationship of synonymy between English words. This is one aspect of vocabulary knowledge, or general vocabulary ability, which is itself one part of verbal ability.
The item type found in these tests resembles several item types that are common on professional intelligence tests, all requiring the ability to access knowledge about some relationship that holds between words based on their meanings.
The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, for example, includes a Vocabulary Subtest. On this subtest, subjects attempt to define words when these words are presented orally and in written form.
In fact, any test that measures vocabulary in subjects' native language is likely to tap into general intelligence to a substantial degree. Measuring size and grasp of vocabulary is one of the quickest ways of getting a good estimate of a person's intelligence.
In thebook The Making of a Scientist by clinical psychologist Anne Roe, the author studied eminent scientists, all men, some of whom had won Nobel Prizes. She subjected them to a variety of tests and investigated their upbringings in an effort to determine what separates the great ones in a field that is already quite rarefied compared to the general population.
Roe had these eminent scientists take three intelligence tests, one verbal, one spatial, and one mathematical. The verbal tests contained two item types. The first was a six-choice antonym item type. Subjects were given four words, and had to select the two words among the four that were most opposite in meaning to each other. Here is the example of this item type that Roe gives (p. 161):
- predictable
- precarious
- stable
- laborious
The answer to this example is (2,3), because "precarious" and "stable" are more opposite in meaning to each other than are any other pair of words from the four.
The second item type is similar to the related words tests on this website, where a word is given along with some number of other words which are answer choices, except the items on Roe's test were not based on relatedness but what we might call disrelatedness.
Roe's example of this second item type will illustrate this (p. 161):
ABSOLUTE
- forget
- usurp
- absolve
- utilize
- limit
The answer to this example is (5), because something that is absolute is not limited.
Simple tests of vocabulary are even better at measuring verbal comprehension ability than are tests that require subjects to extract and synthesize information from written paragraphs, as J. P. Guilford noted in his The Nature of Human Intelligence: "Reading Comprehension is a faithful test for the verbal-comprehension factor but usually is not so strongly related as are simple vocabulary tests" (p. 56).
This may be somewhat surprising, as subjects taking these tests report a lack of any phenomenological experience of problem-solving, of "using" their intelligence. But, vocabulary in one's native language is not usually acquired by rote memorization or anything like it.
Vocabulary is learned in a process that involves substantial use of intelligence to analyze and synthesize information concerning the contexts in which words are used or not used. Vocabulary tests, this line of reasoning goes, are "proof of work" tests, measuring the exercise of one's intellectual abilities at a previous time.