Vocabulary

How to speed up your vocabulary learning and how to choose what words to learn

What does it mean to "know a word"?

There are various levels of understanding of, and being able to use, a word or phrase. The following is a brief list.

You can:

recognise a word when you read it and have at least a vague idea of its meaning in context.
supply a translation of a word into your own language.
pronounce the word.
spell the word.
give a simple definition of the word in your own language.
give a simple definition of the word in English.
supply a synonym and/or an antonym.
You can use the word in context.
You can use other forms of the word in context (using the noun form instead of a verb, for example).
You can recognise when the word is used inappropriately (because it has been mistaken for a similar word or has been used with odd collocations).
You can use the word or phrase in context with appropriate collocations).
You can explain various meanings of the word, their synonyms and antonyms, and say whether they might be appropriate words to use in academic writing.

The vocabulary skills and tools you need

In order to learn vocabulary (and you need a lot of vocabulary in order to write well) you need a systematic approach and and a set of skills and tools to help you master this long-term task.

You need to keep a record of the words you are trying to learn. This can be on paper (just fine - you don't need anything high tech to learn vocabulary) or on some device. Repetition is important - you need to see and use a word a number of times before it becomes fixed in your memory. Spaced repetition apps can be useful but you don't need them if you are determined and organised enough to revisit your notes every day. If you are a speaker of English as a second language studying at university you may need to boost your level of vocabulary considerably and fast. A native speaker of English in tertiary education probably has a usable vocabulary of around 17000 words (see below). If you already know 7000 words, you still have a disadvantage of 10000 words. You will certainly learn many of the words you need in the normal course of your studies but you're going to struggle in the early part of your course. Do some simple arithmetic; if you are on a three year course, you'll need to learn 10 new words a day to learn 10,000 words in three years, and by then your course will be finished. So you need to learn more - at least 20 new words a day. With a systematic approach, you can do this. And as you progress the task will become easier.

What words do you need to learn? Obviously, all the new words which you come across which are a central to your area of study. But also a lot of general (often abstract) words which are used more often in academic discourse than in other forms of speech and writing. It helps to learn these and their collocations. You can see more about academic word lists below).

These are the skills you need, and some tools to help you.

You must be able to use a dictionary - bilingual and English, online and conventional book form. Not just for a definition, translation or spelling, but also for pronunciation, collocations, grammatical information, register, synonyms and antonyms. Being able to use synonyms (or near synonyms) antonyms, and superordinate terms gives you more flexibility in how you write, allowing you to avoid too much repetition. They are often used in lexical chains, which contribute to cohesion in text. You can see an example on the lexical chains page.
You should learn about prefixes and suffixes. This can help you guess the meanings of unfamiliar words when you see them in context.
You must understand the grammar of a word and be able to use its different forms (noun, verb adjective ...). Grammar Information is available in the Cambridge English Dictionary and on this site.
You need to understand register - what types of text is the word used in and at what level of formality. Good dictionaries tell you about this or may just signal a word as formal or informal. You'd probably want to avoid informal words in academic writing.
It is sometimes useful to be able to use a thesaurus. But be careful; as with synonyms, words are not usually replaceable in all contexts and grammatical forms. There are often subtle differences in meaning and use in terms of register, formality or style. VisuWords is a visual way of looking at related words and the Macmillan Thesaurus is a more conventional thesaurus. Snappy words is a combined thesaurus and dictionary which enables you to view related words and their definitions; a very useful tool.
Abstract nouns are important in academic writing and they are used in special ways (as shell nouns) to refer to ideas in other parts of a text. You can learn more about these on the abstract nouns page.
You must learn about collocation. This means learning about which words tend to occur more often when they modify a particular word. There are some examples on this site. You can see some collocations used in noun phrases on the noun phrase collocation page and you can see some other examples in the glossary. If you are a student of English as a second language you may need to study collocations carefully as part of your vocabulary learning efforts. Even good writers of English sometimes use odd collocations perhaps because of first language interference. If you'd like familiarise yourself with some common collocates of words from the Academic Word List you can play the Collocation Game. You can also familiarise yourself with common collocates of words in the academic word list by consulting the AWL Collocation Dictionary

Using word lists for academic writing

Whether you are a native speaker/writer of English or are learning English as a second language, expanding your vocabulary is an extremely important aspect of improving you writing skills. The task is simpler for native speakers, who probably already have a wide vocabulary at their disposal is they are studying at a tertiary level. However, most students entering tertiary education whose first language is not English face an especially difficult task. See Nation and Waring (1997). Many of these students may have only IELTS band 6 or 7 level English (CEFR level B2/C1 - see IELTS and CEFR levels) and a vocabulary size of less than 5000 words (compared to a native speaker’s 17000 words) on entering tertiary level education. These students need to narrow this disparity as fast as possible. In fact, improving vocabulary levels is probably the single most important thing a language learner can do to quickly improve proficiency.

One of the best ways to do this is to read as much as possible and to read widely; but that’s not enough. It would take an enormous amount of reading for a learner to come across, understand, and assimilate all the words, phrases and idioms needed reach native speaker level. And in doing so the learner would probably end up learning a lot of rarer words of limited use (unless they are concerned with the student’s particular speciality).

For this reason it’s important the student have access to word lists which indicate which words are generally more frequent and which words are more likely to be used in academic writing. It's possible to narrow this down even further for some specialist study areas (Business and Nursing, for example; consult the Business Service List and the Nursing Academic Word List. The following are the main lists used to help students concentrate on learning the most useful words in academic writing. A very useful review of these lists was written by Dana Therova (2020) and you can find the reference in the bibliography on the credits page.

If you are learning English as a second language for academic purposes your teachers will probably use one or more of these lists to help you with your vocabulary learning. You can also use them yourself to decide which words to prioritize in your own vocabulary learning efforts. You can use the vocabulary quizzes to practice your understanding of words in the Academic Word List. You can play Five-A-Day game, which is a quick daily colllocation game. You can also play the collocation game which will help you understand collocations of many "academic" words. It is based mainly on the Academic Word List. You can see further details about the words used in the collocation game and how it can help your vocabulary learning on the collocation game details page.