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Vocabulary Lists | Vocabulary.com

  • 23 WordsElectoral Elocution: The Verbiage of Voting
  • 12 WordsOne Nation, Under Vocabulary: Political Parlance
  • 24 WordsSome Political and Philosophical -isms
  • 25 WordsU.S. Government Lingo
  • Selected Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

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In this poem by William Butler Yeats, the speaker reflects on the failed Irish uprising against the. ..

16 Words

22-year-old Amanda Gorman became the youngest inaugural poet in American history when she read her...

20 Words

In this classic Russian short story, a low-level bureaucrat's life is upended when he attempts to...

35 Words

In this short story, the narrator and other girls raised by wolves try to adapt to life in human...

45 Words

  • 20 Words"This Is Water" by David Foster Wallace
  • 30 WordsOn Your Mark, Get Set, Commence Your Life!
  • 25 Words"Living Like Weasels" by Annie Dillard
  • 20 WordsSteve Jobs's Commencement Address (2005)
  • 27 WordsPresident Obama's Commencement Address (2016)
  • 20 WordsStarting Your New Life: Inspiring Words from Commencement Speeches

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Charles Darwin expounded his theories on evolution in "The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. "...

13 Words

George Orwell reflects on imperialism as he recounts an incident that occurred when he was a police...

30 Words

In this essay, novelist Amy traces her development as a writer by reflecting on the ways she and her...

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This 19th-century transcendentalist essay argues that spending time in nature helps people resist...

30 Words

  • 150 Words Every 5th Grader Should Know
  • 125 Words Every 6th Grader Should Know
  • 125 Words Every 7th Grader Should Know
  • 125 Words Every 8th Grader Should Know
  • 120 Words Every 9th Grader Should Know
  • 120 Words Every 10th Grader Should Know
  • 120 Words Every 11th Grader Should Know
  • 120 Words Every 12th Grader Should Know

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Whether you're hoping to improve your comprehension of reading assignments or simply looking to. ..

10 Words

Whether you're preparing for a standardized test, hoping to improve your comprehension of reading...

25 Words

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The Word Knowledge section of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is a vocabulary...

100 Words

  • 16 WordsNovember Vocabulary Words
  • 12 WordsThis Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for October 29–November 4, 2022
  • 12 WordsThis Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for November 5–November 11, 2022

Stories about playful bumblebees, a toxic toad, and stressed-out mice all contributed words to this...

12 Words

Stories about recreational fear, astronaut shelters on Mars, and King Tut's tomb all contributed. ..

12 Words

Stories about expensive bread, gravestone recipes, and a Ghostbusters hotel all contributed words to...

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Stories about a sarcastic fish, a Japanese anime theme park, and a beloved bird all contributed...

18 Words

Stories about Indigenous People's Day, urban coyotes, and a cursed concert hall all contributed...

18 Words

Stories about Fat Bear Week, pro pickleball, and a 40-foot human tower all contributed words to this...

17 Words

Stories about Elton John, a rocket-asteroid collision, and shy raccoons all contributed words to...

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Stories about basketball champions, quadrillions of ants, and the Eiffel Tower all contributed words...

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  • 30 WordsThe Declaration of Independence
  • 35 WordsDeclaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress
  • 15 WordsPreamble to the U. S. Constitution (1787)
  • 40 WordsThe Constitution of the United States
  • 40 WordsThe Bill of Rights
  • 40 WordsThe Federalist Papers, No. 1 by Alexander Hamilton
  • 60 WordsThe Federalist Papers, No. 10 by James Madison
  • 35 WordsThe Federalist Papers, No. 14 by James Madison
  • 40 WordsThe Federalist Papers, No. 51 by James Madison

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The full title of this declaration includes a focus on citizenship, and it was published two years...

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The Treaty of Paris officially concluded the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain. ...

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This introduction to the United States Constitution lays out the foundational principles of the...

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The Declaration of Sentiments was presented in July 1848 at the first Women's Rights Convention in...

30 Words

  • 14 WordsAbraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" (1863)
  • 40 WordsRichard Nixon's "Checkers" Speech (1952)
  • 25 WordsJohn F. Kennedy's Address to the American People on the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
  • 60 WordsDwight D. Eisenhower, "The Military-Industrial Complex" (1961)
  • 30 WordsFranklin D. Roosevelt, "A Date That Will Live In Infamy" (1941)
  • 35 WordsHerbert Hoover on "Rugged Individualism" (1928)
  • 30 WordsTheodore Roosevelt on "New Nationalism" (1910)
  • 30 WordsJimmy Carter on "The Crisis of Confidence" (1979)
  • 30 WordsLyndon B. Johnson on "The Great Society" (1964)
  • 35 WordsTheodore Roosevelt on "The Man with the Muck Rake" (1906)
  • 50 WordsRonald Reagan, "Tear Down This Wall" (1987)
  • 50 WordsFranklin Roosevelt, "Four Freedoms" (1941)

On Wednesday, January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United...

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In this speech, Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, argues for the importance of...

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At just 272 words long, Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" is widely considered to be one of the...

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In this speech, delivered at Riverside Church in New York City, King expresses his opposition to the...

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In this powerful speech delivered on July 5, 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass argued that the. ..

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Sojourner Truth's speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Ohio asked a question that could...

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President Trump delivered his second State of the Union Address on February 5, 2019. The President...

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Learn the vocabulary that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used to inspire a generation to break free...

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  • 25 Words-able
  • 18 Words-acy
  • 14 Words-arian
  • 12 Words-escence
  • 18 Words-ette
  • 15 Words-ful
  • 13 Words-fy
  • 40 Words-ism
  • 15 Words-less
  • 20 Words-ology
  • 10 Words-scope

Here are 15 common English words whose roots come from indigenous languages of the Americas. The...

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Knowledge is power, so learn these words that derive from the Latin roots cogn and conn, meaning...

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These words derive from the Latin roots dec ("ten"), cent ("hundred"), and mille ("thousand"). Start...

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Have a close look at this list of words that include the suffix -scope, meaning "an instrument for...

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All of the English words on this lists have Arabic origins. While some, like caliph and imam,...

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Learn this list of words that include the suffix -escence, meaning the "process or state of being."

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Derived from Latin, the English suffix -acy in English means "the state of" or "the quality or...

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English has borrowed many words from Yiddish, which is itself an amalgam of German, Russian, Hebrew. ..

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  • 15 WordsVocabulary for Native American Heritage Month
  • 16 WordsFlying High: Vocab for National Aviation Month
  • 20 WordsElection Lingo: Vocab for Election Day, November 8
  • 15 WordsVocabulary for Veterans Day, November 11
  • 10 WordsVocabulary for World Kindness Day, November 13
  • 15 WordsIn a Pickle: Vocab for National Pickle Day, November 14
  • 16 WordsVocabulary for Thanksgiving, November 24
  • 22 WordsMaterial World: Vocab for Black Friday, November 25

Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was originally called in the localities in which it was. ..

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Mothers do so many things, which is why a good nap may be the best gift you can give your own mom on...

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Rejoice, Star Wars fans! May the 4th is National Star Wars Day! The epic film series launched plenty...

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Eid al-Fitr is a worldwide religious holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. Here is a link to the...

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Turn over a new lexical leaf and branch out with this list of arboreal vocabulary. Learning these...

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National Grilled Cheese Day is celebrated on April 12. To show our appreciation for this iconic...

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You'd be a fool not to learn these words related to pranks, jokes, and deceit. For more on the...

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The Academy Awards are a spectacle of fashion, fame and — oh yeah — movies! Whether you’re writing a. ..

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Vocabulary.com Dictionary - Meanings, Definitions, Quizzes, and Word Games

WORD OF THE DAY

Raze means to tear an object down to the ground. Before a real estate developer can raze a family's home to build another skyscraper, he's going to have to cut them a big check.

Raze is most often used to refer to knocking buildings down for construction projects, but it can also describe tearing down other objects. You can raze the sand dunes in order to make the beach perfectly flat. Raze comes from the word rasen, meaning "to scrape or erase," and it sounds similar to the word erase, which can help you remember its meaning. If you raze something, in a way it has been erased — it no longer exists in its previous form.

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A comprehensive guide to correct word choice

disassemble / dissemble

Disassemble is to take something apart, like an old car motor, but dissemble is sneaky — it means to hide your true self, like the guy who said he was a mechanic but had never actually seen a motor, much less put one back together.

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pitiable / pitiful / piteous / pitiless

We don't often look at four words that can be easily confused for each other, but this pack is an exception.

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reluctant / reticent

Reluctant means resisting or unwilling, while reticent means quiet, restrained, or unwilling to communicate. Is it a distinction worth preserving?

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prostate / prostrate

Oh, for the want of a letter! Prostate is a gland found in male mammals, but prostrate, with an r, means to lie face down. Get them mixed up and you’ll thoroughly confuse your doctor.

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entomology / etymology

Don’t bug out! Entomology is the study of insects, but etymology is the study of words. They sound similar and both end in -logy, which means “the study of,” but don’t mix them up unless you like completely confusing people.

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formidable / formative

Formidable describes a foe you're slightly afraid of, but formative describes what formed you. Perhaps a formidable gym teacher told you to get the lead out during your formative years in grade school, and now you're a world-class athlete. (Or a bookworm, depending on how you react to formidable foes.)

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7 Practical Ways to Expand Your Vocabulary / Sudo Null IT News

One of the most important tasks in learning a foreign language is not only practicing with grammar, but also expanding vocabulary. The more words you know, the more situations you will be able to explain yourself - even if you have big problems with articles and the formation of tenses, you are likely to be understood. And if you know few words, then nothing can be done about it.

It is important to understand that there are two types of vocabulary - active and passive. The first of these consists of words that you actively use, and the second is vocabulary that you “know” and understand. There are ways to increase the vocabulary of both types. I found an interesting post with a selection of practical ways to do this and prepared an adapted translation of it. Go!

Read a lot (various texts)

This is the most obvious advice, but it is also the most effective. Reading allows you to get acquainted with a large number of words in what is probably the most effective context for their application. Often this allows you to guess the meaning of the word, even if you do not know it - simply due to the words surrounding it.

An important point: you don't have to read the same thing (so you won't expand your vocabulary). Any texts will do - books, articles on the Internet, even the menu in a restaurant often contains unfamiliar words.

Reading is a great way to expand your passive vocabulary. Therefore, in order to really start using the words that you learned with it, you need to combine this method with some other from the list below.

Use a dictionary

It is “reading” the dictionary that is a pleasure. For most people, this is of no interest. But if, for example, when you read, you have a dictionary at hand (more likely, a computer or a phone with a dictionary), it can be much more effective.

If you do not understand a word in the text and cannot guess its meaning from the context of the sentence, then you can only use a dictionary. Today there are a huge number of them, for example, there is an extension for browsers that allow you to find out the meaning of a word on any web page by clicking.

The advantage of online dictionaries, like Google Translate, is that with their help you can not only find out the meaning of a word, but also listen to the correct pronunciation. And as you know in English "Liverpool is written, and Manchester is read", so this is a very useful feature. Just find interesting words, study their meaning, try to repeat the pronunciation.

Enter word of the day

Some language learning sites or dictionaries (such as dictionary.com) have a word of the day, trending word, or newly added feature. This is a simple technique for memorizing new words - if you add a word a day to your vocabulary, you can seriously improve.

Learn etymology

Etymology tells about the origin of words and phrases. Why, for example, when it comes to heavy rain they say ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’?

Sites like urbandictonary (for all its brutality) and the Online Etymology Dictionary answer the question "where did the word come from" and "why do people say that?" If you have a natural curiosity, then today you can learn more about any word very easily.

Chain of occurrence of the word pharmacy from the Online Etymology Dictionary

Refer to poetry

A huge number of people love music, but songs can also be interesting as literary works (of course, not all of them). Find lyrics and read them while listening to music. Very quickly you will realize that the texts use words you do not know. There are even apps like lyricstraining that gamify the process - you have to type the lyrics of the song while listening to it. It turns out a fun game that spurs interest in learning.

Play word games

Scrabble, crossword puzzles, Jeopardy - any game built around words will be useful for your task. This is a great way to expand your vocabulary, because it works as if "in the background", you do not learn anything separately, but memorize words during the game.

Force yourself to use learned words

At the very beginning, we talked about passive and active vocabulary. We need to work with each of these groups, because it is obvious that we cannot use words that we do not understand. You can move vocabulary from a passive group to an active one by starting to use it.

Speak and write in English, because only practice over and over again will allow you to remember the word and learn how to use it. It is important to remember that you are still learning, so you should not worry about possible mistakes - but correcting them will be another way to better remember the word. Today, there are many tools that tell you when you are wrong, allow you to find an interlocutor, etc. (not so long ago I published a list of such extensions for Chrome and Firefox browsers).

What vocabulary building methods do you use?

Spoken English - what should be the vocabulary.

If ​​you're looking at the Oxford Dictionary now and thinking, "I'll never learn that many words!" - take a break from sad thoughts and read this article. How many words do you really need to know? You may be pleasantly surprised!

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One-two-three-four-five… How many words should I know? Sam Jandreau, founder of the Lingholic project, will answer this question. He will talk about what the 95/5 rule is and how it works for those who learn a foreign language. No magic, just math!

Word, show your passport!

English students often ask, "How many words do I have to learn to be able to hold a conversation on any topic?" Good question, but before answering it, let me ask you another one: How many words do you think the English language has? A question to which there is no intelligible answer. Why? It is impossible to count the number of words in a language for one simple reason - it is difficult to decide what counts as a word.

It is claimed, for example, that for the word "set" the Oxford Dictionary gives 464 definitions. Should we consider a polysemantic word as one word or each interpretation as a separate word? And what about phrasal verbs: “set up”, “set about”, “set apart”, etc.? And what about the so-called open compounds - words like "hot dog", "ice cream", "real estate"? Add to this the singular and plural forms, verb conjugations, different endings, prefixes and suffixes, and you will understand why it is so problematic to answer how many words there are in the English language.

The question should really be: "Do you know how many words are in the largest English dictionary?" If you roughly imagine the number of words in a language, it can be compared with the number of words used 90-95% of the time in everyday speech and in the news.

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Less words - more action

, "The Cat in the Hat", "The Lorax", etc. ) published the book "Green Eggs and Ham". The book was written in just 50 words and was the result of a dispute between Seuss and his publisher, Bennett Cerf. The publisher believed that Seuss would not be able to create a finished work in such harsh conditions (before that, Seuss had already written "The Cat in the Hat", which featured 225 words).

If it's possible to write a book in just 50 words, does that mean we don't need 40,000 words to communicate with each other? Note, however, that according to Susie Dent, a lexicographer, the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is about 20,000 words, and the passive one is about 40,000 words.

What is the difference between active and passive vocabulary? In simple terms, active vocabulary includes words that you can remember on your own and apply. As for the passive vocabulary, these are those words that you recognize, the meaning of which you know, but which you are not able to use yourself.

How many words do you know, sir?

And here we come to the most interesting part. On the one hand, an adult native English speaker has an active vocabulary of about 20,000 words. On the other hand, The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists states that the first 25 words are used in 33% of everyday written texts, the first 100 words in 50%, and the first thousand words occur in 89% of such texts!

Thus, we can safely say that only 3000 words cover about 95% of general texts (news articles, blog entries, etc.). Liu Na and Nation proved that 3000 is the approximate number of words we need to know in order to understand the rest from context when reading unsimplified texts.

Do the math!

The Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 common words. 95% of general texts cover a vocabulary of only 3,000 words. That's 1.75% of all words!

That's right: knowing 1. 75% of the English vocabulary, you can understand 95% of what you read. This is only 7.5% of the average passive vocabulary of a native speaker (40,000 words). Isn't it great?

On the Pareto law and the importance of linguistic guesswork

You may have heard of Pareto's Law, also known as the 80/20 principle. The Italian engineer and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto studied numerous phenomena and subjects, from land ownership to pea pods, and as a result he deduced a rule that was called Pareto's law: 20% of causes produce 80% of effects. Or, if you apply the law to study or work: 20% of efforts give 80% of the result.

English learners need to understand 90-95% of the most commonly used words in everyday life. Where exactly do these numbers come from? Approximately as many words you need to know in order to understand well what is written and said. In addition, having learned just that many words, you can guess the meaning of the remaining 5-10% simply from the context! Not exactly 80/20, but the principle is the same: only a small part of your efforts will bring significant results.

This is an extremely important moment! If you have already reached a high level of understanding of the language, this means that it is time to close the dictionary and allow yourself to learn "inductively", from context and by guesswork. You already do this every day - after all, no one knows all the words in their native language. So why not do the same with English?

Weigh your vocabulary!

So, if you achieve an understanding of 95% of the most commonly used words in a language, you can understand the rest of the unfamiliar words from the context.

Of course, knowing the words does not mean perfectly understanding what you are listening to or reading, because language is also grammar, phraseological units and figures of speech that can (and will) get in your way. A sentence can consist entirely of words that are perfectly familiar to you and at the same time be completely incomprehensible - precisely because of such linguistic phenomena.

Despite this, in most cases, knowing 90-95% of the words in a sentence and context allows you to understand and communicate in a language without much difficulty - especially if it belongs to the same language family as your native language.

Yes, the English language has a huge number of words, so for many it seems like an impenetrable fortress that will take decades to take. In reality, if from the very beginning you learn words in context, step by step building up your vocabulary "arsenal" to 2500-3000 units, it is really possible in a short time to reach a level at which you can read general texts and understand 90-95% of what is said .

This is the ideal number, exactly how many words you need to learn in order for the experience of reading foreign language texts to be successful. This is also the approximate number of words that you need to know in order to catch the meaning of the remaining words from the context.

"Golden" 3 thousand words

To make the difficult task of learning English easier for us, the scientists behind the Oxford English Dictionary have tried to compile the TOP 3000 most important words to learn first - The Oxford 3000™:

http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/wordlist/english/oxford3000/

iPhone Mobile:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-the-oxford-3000/id939586542? mt=8 (US$7.99)

An alternative from the creators of Merriam-Webster's 3,000 Core Vocabulary Words:

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/3000-words

How to assess your vocabulary

On the most popular site http:// testyourvocab.com/ you can roughly estimate the size of your vocabulary.

Interesting: