Answer yes or no, one word at a time, and get an estimate of your Italian vocabulary in about a minute.
Do you know this word?
altro
Answer yes only if you could say what the word means. A few made-up words are mixed in to keep the estimate honest.
Y yes · N no · U undo
Your estimated Italian vocabulary
0 words
Whatever your number is today, it grows the same way: reading. Books repeat the most useful words until you know them. Try it right in the widget below.
An educated native Italian speaker knows roughly 15,000 to 20,000 word families, a B2 reader about 8,000 to 9,000, and a B1 speaker around 2,000 to 3,000. This free test estimates your own Italian vocabulary in about a minute: 60 words shown one at a time, yes or no, sampled across six frequency bands, with hidden pseudowords to correct for guessing.
The hardest part of measuring vocabulary is that you can't be asked about every word. So this test samples them. Italian words are sorted by frequency, how often they appear in real usage, and split into six bands, from the 600 most common words down to words ranked around 25,000th. You see eight words from each band.
The share you know in a band is scaled up to the whole band. Know six of eight words in a band that stands for 2,000 word families, and you've likely got about 1,500 of them. Adding every band gives your estimate. Then comes the honesty check: mixed into the same sequence are invented words that look real but aren't. The more of those you answer yes to, the more the test assumes you were guessing, and it scales your score down to match.
It's an estimate, not an exam, read it as a range and a level. What it's genuinely good at is showing where your Italian vocabulary thins out, and that the surest way to thicken it is to keep reading.
The list mixes real words from Italian frequency lists with a few made-up ones that catch guessing, so which is which is not marked here.
Italian wears its Latin roots openly, with cognates an English reader recognises on sight, possibile, nazione, famiglia. Spelling is almost perfectly phonetic, so a word read is a word you can pronounce. Watch false friends such as camera (room) and parente (relative, not parent).
In real usage, the 1,000 most common Italian words already cover about 76% of everyday text, and the top 5,000 cover roughly 90%. The rarer words beyond that are where vocabularies really differ, which is why this test samples them too, not just the common ones.
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This test estimates it in about a minute. You see 60 Italian words one at a time and answer yes or no to each. The words are sampled across the whole frequency range, from the most common down to rare ones. The share you know in each frequency band is scaled up to the size of that band, and the totals are added together. Made-up words are mixed in; saying yes to those lowers your score, which corrects for guessing.
The words come from real Italian frequency lists, split into six bands by how common each word is. If you say yes to 6 of the 8 words shown from a band that represents 2,000 word families, that band contributes roughly 1,500 known words. We sum every band, then apply a guessing correction based on how many non-existent (pseudo) words you claimed. The result is an estimate of your written vocabulary up to about 25,000 word families.
About a fifth of the words you see are pseudowords, invented strings that follow Italian spelling rules but are not real words. They look plausible, so if you answer yes to them you are guessing. The test subtracts that guessing rate from your real score so the estimate stays honest. Be strict: say yes only if you could explain what the word means.
Roughly 2,000-3,000 of the most frequent word families cover everyday conversation (around B1). To read a novel comfortably you usually need about 8,000-9,000 word families (B2-C1). Educated native speakers know somewhere around 15,000-20,000. More than the count, what matters is meeting those words repeatedly in real context.
It is a quick estimate, not an exam. Because it samples only a few words per frequency band, the number can swing by a few hundred to a couple of thousand. It is best read as a range and a level, and as a way to see which frequency bands you have already mastered. Reading real books is the fastest way to grow that number.