FAQ

Fictitiously, Frequently, and/or Factually Asked Questions.

No FAQs matching faqs for 'book length' found.

How are the vocabulary words selected?

Anything that makes reading comprehension easier is fair game. The list includes not just general vocabulary, but also foods, places, people, fashions, animals, etc. Since ajvocab.com is intended for the "average Joe" there are certain terms we ignore/include:

How did you choose these book titles?

Most of the books listed are ones that one of us has read—or plans to read.

What is a ‛comprehensive’ type?

As it sounds, it is a title that has a 'complete' vocabulary list. Although we do make an effort to include every vocabulary card for the titles listed as "comprehensive", we do have our limits. We may not, for instance, include some abstruse vocabulary word that is found only in a single instance and nowhere else. (Then again, we might. We're mercurial like that.)

If we claim a term is not used in a particular book, and that title is a comprehensive type, and it is used in the same sense as one of our definitions, then we missed one. Shoot us an email and if we concur, we'll fix it.

What is a ‛partial’ type?

It is not practical for us to include every vocabulary word for every single title listed on the site (it takes too much time and effort). Partial coverage implies that we are not attempting to collect every vocabulary word for that particular title. If a title gets enough support, however, we may recategorize a partial type to a comprehensive type.

How many vocabulary terms are featured on the site?

As of November 2019 our entire collection contains over 10,000 terms, however only a fraction of this has been released on the website. There are a few reasons for the holdup:
  1. Many of the definitions are not finished; we complete and post them in the support order on the title list page.
  2. Several of the definitions contain sound files and images from open sources, and many of these require licenses. Although we have dutifully included the license information where required, we would not be willing to gamble $30,000 that we made no errors. When we read that news item we removed over half of our content so we can verify the license information (this before site launch). If the “unintended consequences” from that dysnomy proves as bad as we think, we may shut the website down.

What is the "progress" row on the overview page?

Decks we are currently working on. Basically we extract cards from the main deck and focus only on those cards for the month. Copying the information up to the web site is a hassle, so we probably will not release more cards more frequenty than once or twice a month.

Why don't the vocabulary counts equal the total number of tags in the breakdown tables (on the overview page)?

Many words have more than one tag. A few examples:

Complicating matters are words that have several meanings. One example is sorrel which has both an equestrian and an unrelated botany definition. In this case we made a separate definition for sorrel horse. When this is not possible we try to find at least one usage example for each definition. It is not the perfect solution, but for now it is the best we can offer.

Why do some collections not have a difficulty index?

It only makes sense to calculate a difficulty index for comprehensive collections, and since it is not practical for us to create such collections for every title it just cannot be otherwise.

Which title has the highest difficulty index?

As of today it will likely be Shakespeare's Hamlet since Shakespeare liked to coin new terms. We decided to make Ben Jonson's The Alchemist comprehensive as well just for comparison.

As a general rule older titles tend to have higher difficulty indices.

What does roughly and about imply with a difficulty index?

Roughly means that we are only partway finished with our vocabulary collection; the value is calculated by extrapolation. For example, as of today our Hamlet vocabulary collection contains 202 words. Had we no more terms to add at this point the difficulty index would be:

difficulty index = (202 × 1,000)/32,000 = 6.3
However since this vocabulary collection is only approximately halfway finished:
difficulty index ≅ 6.3 × 2 ≅ 13
So when the collection is complete, Hamlet will likely have a difficulty index in the neighborhood of 13 (we should be finished with the Hamlet collection by spring of 2020).

About implies the collection is at least 90% complete. The difficulty index in these cases likely won't drop, but the value might inch up somewhat.

What is “ajvocab’s difficulty index”?

Quite simply it is the total number of vocabulary words in a book divided by how many thousands of words in that book. So the difficulty index for a 100,000 word book having a vocabulary count of 100 equals exactly one.

Remember that our difficulty index IS NOT our rating of how good a book is; we have read many fantastic books that do not require extensive vocabularies (Jane Harper's The Dry is one example, Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes is another). If people thought that the best books were only those with the most difficult words, they would only read books in languages they don't understand.

It only makes sense to calculate this index for titles we list as comprehensive, so we do not publish difficulty indices for partial (or other) types.

Why do some books have a vocabulary count that is 'climbing'?

Simply because we are not done with publishing all of the definitions for that title yet. How much higher it climbs obviously depends both on the difficulty of the book and whether the collection will be partial or comprehensive.

Why did you include i.e. Mozart, Rembrandt and Liverpool? Those are commonly known.

Are they commonly known? Likely the average Joe knows that Rembrandt was a Dutch painter, Mozart a composer, and Liverpool is in England. My bet is that they cannot differentiate between a Rembrandt and a Renoir, wouldn't know Mozart's music from Liszt's, and couldn't point out Liverpool on an unlabeled map. Even Hyacinth Bucket struggled with the first two (although it's assumed she knew were Liverpool is).

"Hey, not all of Mozart's paintings were perfect!"

Andy Reid during a post-game locker room speech after the K.C. Chiefs defeated the Detroit Lions on September 29, 2019.

BTW, if you attempt to read Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, knowing the artists and composers helps greatly with comprehension, regardless of which translation you read.

Why are there so many geography terms?

OK, we concede that sometimes we do go too far, but it really does help reading comprehension to have a good grasp of geography; it makes it easier to follow the plot.

I had always proposed to myself to get him well down the river in the boat; certainly well beyond Gravesend, which was a critical place for search or inquiry if suspicion were afoot.

Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)

Why isn't every definition for a word listed / why are some of the words so easy?

We skip familiar definitions known by a majority of English speakers. For example, since we consider the words meet, souse, and sleeper elementary vocabulary, books using these words only in the everyday sense are skipped: Rather than making our job easier, this is a major hurdle in completing the vocabulary collections; we must verify not only whether the word is used in the book, but also what sense it is used. The confounded words are the bane of this site's existence.

If not all the uses are show, what indicates the selected vocabulary word is in a vocabulary collection?

The “uses” button is greyed-out when the word is not in that vocabulary collection. If we believe the word is in a selected book, then the “uses” button will have a black border. This makes it possible to click through different book titles on the side menu and quickly ascertain whether that vocabulary word is in that collection.

lassitude not in this book
lassitude is not in our Anna Karenina vocabulary collection.
lassitude is in this book
lassitude is used in Orwell's 1984.

Remember that we do not necessary show every vocabulary word use for every title, but if we claim a word is in a book, then it is probably in that book (or at least some form of that word).

Why not list all the uses for every vocabulary word for every book in your title list?

It's just not practical, therefore we try to include at least a few and place the best uses towards the top.

As an example, take the word irresolute. Although we provided five uses of the word, we know that irresolute is also used in War and Peace, Wuthering Heights, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Treasure Island, Frankenstein, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Count of Monte-Cristo, Jane Eyre, Ulysses, and over a dozen other titles that we are aware of. This may be an extreme example as irresolute is (what we call) a core vocab word, but it illustrates the point.

There is an error on the web site!

That is not a question, and the statement is wrong; there are thousands of errors, we just haven't found them yet.

How do I report an error?

If you are sure there is an error you can report it on our contact page.

Why don't all the words have pronuncations?

We are working on it—and we need help. Unfortunately we lack the programming infrastructure for such sharing, but if we get enough feedback from people willing to help with word pronunciation we will write the code.

This would basically involve a (non-automated) new user screen, a record button, a playback button, an upload button, and some code infrastructure. It is doubtful we could support smartphones. As with all software, bug fixes and improvements would be incremental.

Shoot us an email on the contact page if you are willing to help with word pronunciations (also note languages and region). If there is enough interest we will write the code.

Why are foreign words sometimes listed as synonyms?

This sometimes occurs with words of Russian, Hebrew and Arabic origin. Technically they should go on a separate field, but there are already too many fields so we decided to paste them in with the synonyms. Sorry if it bothers you, but unless we have a compelling reason to change it, we won't.

How did you decide which icons to include at the bottom of the vocabulary page?

There are just a few criteria:

  1. The external website must have a decent amount of searchable data; nobody likes to visit a site that constantly returns no results found. Even ajvocab.com fails this criteria, but we get a pass.
  2. The site must respect people's privacy. Unfortunately very few websites meet this condition, and often when a site claims to respect privacy it's nugatory because the site utilizes one (or more) of those nearly ubiquitous web analytic tools; so every detail of your visit is tracked, recorded, and aggregated by a third party that could give a rat's ass about privacy. Here is a perfect example of this; three trackers on “we-are-committed-to-the privacy-of-our-visitors” noaa.org—blocked by duckduckgo's privacy essentials. (And why does a government-funded agency use these intrusive technologies? Maximize profits?)

    Had we been too strict with this policy there would be few links. Therefore we decided to take a more pragmatic approach: we give preference to sites with the best privacy practices and exclude those with the worst. The displayed icons are roughly ordered from left to right in order of best to worst privacy practices. This is not automatically calculated and must be occasionally reviewed.

    If you are unfamiliar with the intrusive tracking that seems to have become the core of the internet, we suggest that you install duckduckgo's privacy essentials and/or use the brave browser; both block trackers and give an indication of how much (or little) a website values privacy.

ajvocab geography icons
geography links, for example.
Have a great suggestion for a site that meets the above criteria? Please tell us on the contact page. Our (unattainable?) goal is to eventually link only to sites with great content and great privacy practices.

Why do the icons change when different words are selected?

The icons on the vocabulary page change to reflect the category. So there are special sets of icons for, i.e. places, artists, birds, and music. Not every category has a special set of icons.

May I suggest adding a specific website to your icons at the bottom of the vocabulary page definitions?

We are always looking for sites that offer good content and respect people's privacy, so before suggesting a site first make sure the website meets these basic criteria.

Why isn't ajvocab.com a wiki?

That was our original intent, however there are several considerations with wiki pages:

  1. What happens when users upload copyrighted content? We are not lawyers, but we do know the copyright landscape is rapidly changing. We do not have time to fret over nor keep abreast of these changes. This 2019 copyright bill put the nail in the wiki-coffin as far as we are concerned; even if that gets defeated, similar (or worse) bills will pop up.
  2. ajvocab.com is not a multi-million dollar, multi-thousand volunteer organization like wikipedia; we just do not have the resources.
  3. We already use data from external wiki sources, seems redundant.
  4. Ever looked under the hood (the talk link) on a wiki page? Sometimes those discussions can get quite heated. Wikipedia has the infrastructure to handle abuses, but again, we are not wikipedia nor do we aspire to become wikipedia.

Why should I support this site?

While we do not charge for content, we also do not display any tracking ads (we are sick of constant surveillance). While that's great and all, it is not sustainable. So rather than advertising, the highest supported titles get special treatment:
  • Sort order is always by most supported FIRST, and the top twelve titles show up on the front page.
  • The top title gets converted from a partial to a comprehensive type. This is a permanent change.
  • The top title becomes the default title if no title is selected.
  • Every year we plan on taking a new photo of the bookshelf on the title page, and the books displayed will be in order from highest to lowest support (roughly 25 books will fit on that shelf). Older photos will be archived (somewhere...tbd).

How is this site funded?

Right now we bear the cost (and the site is hemorrhaging cash). We are currently investigating funding options, however we will never allow tracking ads regardless of what is decided.