Wordsum is a 10-item vocabulary test that has been included as an item on the General Social Survey (GSS) in most survey years since 1974.^[1] Each of the test's items ranges in difficulty from very easy to very difficult. It is widely used in research in the social and behavioral sciences.^[2] It is taken by about 1,000 people in each year in which it is included as part of the GSS.^[3] Its administration involves showing respondents a card containing 10 words, and then asking them to find the synonym for each of them out of a set of five choices.^{[citation needed]} Although most researchers have implicitly assumed that each item on the test deserves equal weight, its validity can be improved by considering the variance for each word separately.^[4]