I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good.
Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: it's not that you're expected to know the whole word, but they're looking for you to recognize components of it and infer the meaning from that. I knew sesquippedalian (sometimes jokingly used in "long word" contexts) so that was easy: but phobia is also easily identifiable, and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome). So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.
Complacent and gauche: have heard both these uses, I think that's straightforwardly correct. If this was a dictionary that would, at worst, be the 2nd or 3rd definition. No complaints.
Source: I used to place in spelling bees and could've been a contender but I didn't have the discipline to study the dictionary for hours on the weekends, which is the next level.
I was, as was gp, confused by “complacent” as I haven’t typically used it or thought of it to include a smugness and immediately went to the ol’ Google only to find that “smug” appears in Merriam Webster’s definition as well. The key though is “smug or uncritical”, so while smug may not be typical for some it does make sense now that I have that added knowledge.
And iirc “gauche” had more than just “socially awkward” in the correct answer but speeding through it again I didn’t get gauche as a word. That said, something gauche, to me, has always been something glaringly “not ok” in a social sense so again, that tracks. Oxford Language defines it as
> lacking ease or grace; unsophisticated and socially awkward.
Which is closer to the quiz’s definition and again, tracks with my internal thinking of the word’s use.
> Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
Was just plain fun - as soon as I saw the “fear of long words” I was like of course that’s it
I will say that breviary it showed up in "advanced" for me, and was one of only two words below "grandmaster" I missed. In the modern era it is jargon, it's just that the in group (practitioners of liturgical Christianity) are in the ballpark of a quarter of the English speaking world.
I'll remark that "if you have interest in [some particular academic pursuit], you'd likely know it" is a pretty decent description of the sort of word that shows up in "grandmaster" tier.
(I have joked that, living in Japan, my English is getting worse faster than my Japanese is getting better, but breviary might well be a concrete example.)
To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia
Yes. It is a word which seems to only be used as an example of a long and obscure word. I have never heard it used expressively, other than as a joke.
Yes, breviary is the only word in the first 80 that I hadn't ever seen before but I understand that if you're Catholic it's probably not that much weirder than "rosary" or "Eucharist" or whatever which are words I did know, so fine.
In the last batch there were a few words that I was vaguely confident of but a lot more of them seemed like "stunt" words I would never see because every time they'd need defining so why bother.
Also I was assuming it was picking from a huge set, but it seems everybody was shown the same words, so while it's supposedly a "sample" any bias, even if unintended, shows up in the results, if you wanted to be scientific perhaps you'd do this for 1000 words and then sample 100 questions from that for each participant or something.
In many books from 1800s the priest is always described having his breviary at hand. It's also often featured when priests appear in jokes.
> and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome)
Well.. Hippos is greek for horse, and Hippopotamus is a "river horse". Same for Hippodrome, a course for horses. And in latin, hypo means small (and not large), as seen in e.g. hypoglycemia.
And I thought in German Nilpferd (horse from the Nile) sounded ridiculous. It is almost the same as the original. TIL
Hypo is Greek too, not Latin "small" for a latin radical would be "mini" (from "minus") like in miniature, minuscule, etc.
> So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.
Except "hippo-" is from Greek and means "horse".
Ucalegon was perhaps the most ridiculous to me, much more a factor of your knowledge of classical literature than vocabulary.
For explicit comparison: kinetic and metamorphosis are ~10x as common as breviary, and 10,000x as common as hippo….
See NGRAMs: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHip...