It depends on what you use them for. If you want to compare the intelligence of people from different cultures, you need a culturally neutral test (whether such a thing exists is another question). For clinical diagnosis, when what you want to test is whether an individual is retarded or if there are suspicious patterns in their test results – like a large difference between their score at different subtests – I don't think it matters.
There are (or were) actually tests used by psychologists that include testing one's vocabulary. Which is knowledge, not intelligence.
There are (or were) actually tests used by psychologists that include testing one's vocabulary. Which is knowledge, not intelligence.