Who knows more words? Americans, Canadians, the British, or Australians?

I have been hard at work on preliminary analyses of data from the the Vocab Quiz, which is a difficult 32 word vocabulary test. Over 2,000 people from around the world have participated so far, so I was curious to see which of the English-speaking nationalities was doing best.

Since the test was made by an American (me), you might expect Americans to do best (maybe I chose words or definitions of words that are less familiar to those in other countries). Instead, Americans (78.4% correct) are near the bottom of the heap, behind the British (79.8%), New Zealanders (82.2%), the Irish (80.1%), South Africans (83.9%), and Australians (78.6% -- OK that one is close). At least we're beating the Canadians (77.4%).


A fluke?

Maybe that was just bad luck. Plus, some of those samples are small -- there are fewer than 10 folks from New Zealand so far. So I pulled down data from the Mind Reading Quotient, which also includes a (different) vocabulary test. Since the Mind Reading Quotient has been running longer, there are more participants (around 3,000). The situation was no better: This time, we weren't even beating the Canadians. 

Maybe this poor showing was due to immigrants in America who don't know English well? Sorry -- the above results only include people whose native language is English. 

I also considered the possibility  that maybe Americans are performing poorly because I designed the tests to be hard, inadvertently including worse that are rare in America but common elsewhere. But the consistency of results across other countries makes that seem unlikely: What do the British, New Zealanders, Irish, South Africans and Australians all know that we don't? This hypothesis suggests that the poor showing by Americans is due to one or two items in particular. Right now there isn't enough data to do item-by-item analyses, but once we have more. Which brings me to...

Data collection continues

If you want to check how good your vocabulary is compared to everyone else who has taken the test -- and if you haven't done so already -- you can take the Vocab Quiz here. At the Mind Reading Quotient, you can test your ability to understand other people -- to read between the lines.

Update:

Phytophactor asks whether these results are significant. In the MRQ data, all the comparisons are significant, with the exception of US v. Canada (which went the other direction in the Vocab Quiz data anyway). The comparison with Australia is a trend (p=.06). See comments below for additional details. I did not run the stats for Vocab Quiz.