A native English speaker told me she has never heard of this word when consulted

It's used rarely but I don't think I've heard it in 20 years. That counts as rarely

Most LLM AI models use very broad written sources. This entirely biases their view on spoken language. Even dictionaries of old do the same by counting word incidence. Plus, you've asked one native speaker. Your sample size isn't enough to infer general population trends.

I'm familiar with the word, mostly as a noun as in 'stop with the histrionics', but I don't think I've ever heard someone say it out loud. I certainly wouldn't use it in casual conversatoin ever.

I don't hear it used in casual conversations. A lot of people would avoid using it, for fear of sounding sexist. Describing a woman as histrionic is often more about discrediting her than accurately conveying her feelings and behavior. So, it's generally better not to use it. What you study is going to affect what words you know. There's that joke: "How do you tell the difference between a chemist and a plumber? Ask them to pronounce unionized." (Plumbers would say union-ized, because most of them are in a union; chemists would say un-ion-ized, because their work deals with a lot of ions.) You can be highly educated and never run into specific words that aren't related to your area of study. A psychology major who doesn't know "histrionic" has been neglecting their books, but a physics major? Probably normal.

This is more of a field-specific jargon word from psychology than a word someone would use in casual conversation. I know it from Histrionic Personality Disorder but I wouldn't be surprised if your average person had to Google it if they read it in a book or something

Histrionic is a word that exists, but I've never heard it spoken in either casual conversation or a formal context, only ever in print.

So... I'm aware of that word and am familiar with the meaning. But I was an English literature major and a bit of a language nerd. And I've only ever seen it in works of literature before. I don't think I've ever used it or heard it used in conversation. And I wouldn't expect the average native speaker to know it given how uncommon it is. And as others have said ChatGPT isn't a good resource. It gives guesses and phrases the answers confidently as facts when they're not.

If you want a correct assessment on how frequent a word is, you should use a reputable dictionary which has that kind of data. One example would be the Oxford Dictionary, which you can find on-line. You can then compare the word to other words and draw conclusions. [https://www.oed.com/dictionary/histrionic\_adj?tab=factsheet#1666268](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/histrionic_adj?tab=factsheet#1666268) There are about 0.4 occurrences of "histrionic" per million words in modern English. For a quick comparison, the word table: [https://www.oed.com/dictionary/table\_n?tab=factsheet#19423070](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/table_n?tab=factsheet#19423070) 100 occurences per million words. So "histrionic" is 250 times rarer than "table". You could use different labels for it. Moderately uncommon is one that could even fit here, so it's not necessarily that ChatGPT was wrong here. You just interpretend it in your own way. Also, no, most people don't know "moderately uncommon words", that's why they are moderately uncommon. There is about 1 million words in English. If I recall correctly, a college educated adult native speaker knows about 30,000 words.

Nah, this is uncommon, high-level vocabulary that most native speakers would not know. The more common word here would be 'hysterical', which most people would know. It also sounds too like 'history', without having a similar meaning to that word root, which I think makes it less likely to be used.

Yes, it's a word. It's not incredibly common. I would use it every month or two - usually when I'm describing someone's personality or behaviour. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Histrionic&year_start=1980&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false

I know the word, but I doubt Ive ever used it or heard it in conversaiton, only in print. It's very rare. English as a language has a LOT more words than any other language, and so there will be a LOT of rare, specialist or highly obscure words out there, and that's before you get into the differences between English, American English, Aussie English and that strange form of English they speak in India. Many native speakers will not know thousands of words, though they may be able to deduce the rough meaning from the structure of the word in some cases.

>A native English speaker told me she has never heard of this word when consulted One person not knowing a word does not count for all people. >ChatGPT tells me the word is classified as 'moderately uncommon', which means it's not 'rare'. Uncommon = rare, so moderately uncommon means kind of rare. >In addition, the native speaker I consulted has a bachelor's degree from the US. What if they major in mathematics or physics? No need to know psychology jargon. >I assume most native speaker would immediately know this word? ? Why would you assume that? >Is it true that there are huge gaps in vocabulary range even between native speakers? (The individual was born and raised in the US and has never lived in other countries.) That’s kinda obvious with specific words from specific fields, like with every language and culture.

I know the word, but only from writing. It’s absolutely not something I’d expect someone to use in casual conversation. Also, I was a psychology major, so that may play a part in why I know it

This thread is falling into histrionics, so I’m going to lock it for now.

British English speaker here. Familiar with the word. As others have said you’ll hear it as a descriptor of exaggerated behaviour or as part of a medical term. 

You shouldn't trust chatbots, they tend to make things up

Yeah that's a word. It is also one that most ordinary people wouldn't know. I do know it, but I have studied psychology a bit, where it is used often in the context of personality disorders and their symptoms. Yes, people in the US have very large gaps in vocabulary. I'd guess it depends mostly on how much people read, their socioeconomic background, and how educated they are. Nearly [40% of Americans](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html) have a Bachelor's degree or more. However, the quality of those degrees vary wildly: from world-renowned universities to scammy for-profit diploma mills. The same is true of the quality of the secondary and primary education Americans receive; because education funding is closely linked to local property tax, many areas with poor citizens have very poor educational outcomes. Some states also have far better educational systems than others, again, with huge differences. There is very little standardization. If you want to be shocked, look up literacy data. It's bad and getting worse. Our society is very unequal; that is just how it is. Still, you can find students that were failed by every system imaginable, but are curious and learn on their own, and develop a very broad vocabulary. I say this to say: the level of educational attainment matters less than the whole story of a person's education. Also, consult a dictionary instead of an AI for meanings (although AI are usually good at showing examples of how words are used). You can also refer to COCA corpus data for frequency of use information.

Ok, firstly, you're asking chatgpt whether a word is common. It doesn't know anything, it just parrots what people want to hear, and secondly yeah, I have no idea what that word means. I'm from the UK, I'm late 20s, I've been to Uni, I enjoy a lot of words, I think I've heard it used maybe... once? Once or twice? Couldn't tell you what it means.  What do you want as an answer to this... question? (Is there a question here?) Because if your question is "why is ChatGPT telling me x" then I think you'll find the mood towards Chatgpt in this sub is one of vitriol, given how often it is just flat-out wrong on grammar. Why would you assume most native speakers would know this word? What are you basing that on? Just Chatgpt? 

It's not "moderately uncommon" at all. I could easily imagine someone going their whole life without ever seeing or hearing the word. AI is like a highly advanced autofill. It doesn't "know" anything. It certainly doesn't know how rare the word "histrionic" is. There are big gaps in vocabulary range between native speakers, and there are two kinds of vocabulary, too. Passive vocabulary are words you know but wouldn't spontaneously use. Active vocabulary are words you know and would spontaneously use. There is a wide range of how many words are in a person's vocabulary among native speakers. And some people also have a marginally larger passive vocabulary than active (so they integrate most of the words they know into their speech), while others are the opposite. That means sometimes people that sound like they use a lot of big fancy words don't know that many, and sometimes people who use a more limited vocabulary when speaking are like living dictionaries.

I've known what it means for quite some time. I'm pretty sure there were multiple times when I heard or read someone describing dramatic behaviour as histrionics. However that might have something to do with my age. I'm 54 and it's possible that the word is in even less common use than it was when I was younger. The fact that I'm a total language nerd who collects unusual words the way some people collect stamps might also have something to do with it. I agree with the other posters who say that you shouldn't trust ChatGPT to tell you the truth. It isn't an oracle. It's just a search engine that compiles search results from multiple sources, regardless of how reliable they are, and presents them as a narrative by an overly-confident person.

There's two things going on here: 1) AI chatbots aren't people, and don't know what people know. 2) Many Americans don't read very much, and don't know very many older, formal, or technical words. "Histrionic" is an older word, it's moderately uncommon in written English but very rarely used in modern speech. Most Americans would use phrases like "grandstanding", "egotistical", "center of attention", "drama queen", or "over-dramatic" to describe a histrionic person. Anyway, "histrionic" is a very good word, and I think you should use it. If some folks don't know it, they can figure it out from context or look it up.