Vocabulary

This video looks at vocabulary, the basic building blocks of a language.

English has more than one billion words and every day new words are being invented. You already know many words in English, possibly thousands of words, but what does it mean to actually know a word, and what is the best way to remember and learn new words?

Knowing a word is complex and it involves many things such as knowing

• the meaning
• the part of speech
• its prefixes and suffixes
• its grammar
• collocation
• register
• spelling, and
• pronunciation.

Let’s look at each these areas in more detail.

Meaning

Of course, we first need to know what a word means. But sometimes a word has many different meanings. Consider for example the word ‘trunk’. An elephant has a trunk, so does a car and a tree. We can also pack a trunk and even wear them when swimming. So we need to pay close attention to the context of a word in order to understand its meaning.

Another example of a word with many meanings that you will find in academic contexts is the word ‘study’. As a noun, this can mean ‘the work of a student’, or ‘a home office’, or it can refer to ‘a published piece of research’. It can also be a verb.

Part of speech

This takes us to our next point: a word’s part of speech. In some grammar books, this is called ‘word class’. It means knowing if a word is a noun, adjective, verb or an adverb. Knowing a word’s part of speech helps you understand how to use that word in a sentence. For example, the word ‘active’ ‘is an adjective, and its adverb form is ‘actively’. So we can say: ‘he is a very active person’ but not ‘he is a very actively person’.

We can also take a word like ‘active’ and by using prefixes and suffixes make many other words, such as the verbs ‘activate, re-activate and de-activate’ or the nouns ‘activity’ and ‘activation’. Prefixes are the additional parts at the beginning of a word; they usually change the meaning.  Suffixes are the additions at the end of a word; they usually change a word’s part of speech. The use of suffixes is important in academic texts because we often make verbs into nouns. This is called ‘nominalisation’. Watch the video about academic vocabulary for more information about this.

Grammar

Another important part of knowing a word is knowing its grammar. For example, many verbs are followed by particular grammatical patterns. Consider the word ‘suggest’ in these sentences. Are all three sentences correct?

Number 1 and number 3 are correct, but number 2 is not. We don’t use the word ‘suggest’ followed by a ‘to + infinitive’ pattern.

Another aspect of a word’s grammar is the preposition that it is used with. Many words are followed by a preposition, for example:  depend on, an increase in, based on, responsible for. It’s important to be aware of these patterns. Also watch the video on countability for more on the grammar of a word.

Collocation

Words often have close relationships with one another.  For example, we say ‘happy birthday’ and ‘merry Christmas’. But we can’t say ‘merry birthday’: the words ‘merry’ and ‘birthday’ don’t collocate. Collocation describes the strong relationship between certain words.

Other examples are ‘make a decision’ but not ‘do a decision’ and ‘strong coffee’, but not ‘powerful coffee’. There are many collocations in English and it is important that you compare English collocations to collocations in your own language.

Register

The register of a word is particularly important for academic writing. ‘Register’ refers to a word’s level of formality: is it appropriate for formal, neutral or informal situations? For example, the word ‘kids’ would not be appropriate in academic writing as it is an informal word and it would generally be better to choose the word ‘children’ or ‘students’. Similarly, ‘progeny’ is a more formal word and would not be appropriate for most situations.

Spelling

Of course, spelling is a very important. Incorrect spelling gives a bad impression, especially in academic and professional contexts. See the video on punctuation and spelling for more on this topic.

Pronunciation

Finally we need to know how to pronounce the word. It is a good idea to learn some basic phonetic script so that you can read the correct pronunciation in a dictionary. Phonetic script is shown between slanted lines like this: / /. The phonetic transcript also shows us which syllable is stressed, often shown like this /’ /. Note that a word’s part of speech sometimes affects its syllabus stress, such as imPORT for a verb, and IMport for a noun.

Summary

So what is the best way to learn new words? We tend to forget up to 80% of what we have learnt within 24 hours, so one key strategy is to keep reviewing the word over a period of time and keep testing yourself. There are a number of very good online flashcard systems that can help you to do this, or you can create your own.

To be able to revise and test yourself, you also need to keep very good vocabulary notes. A good way to do this is to have a book that you use only for noting vocabulary.  It is important to make sure that when you write down new words you add all of the information that we have talked about in this video:  the word’s meaning, part of speech, any prefixes or suffixes, grammar, collocation, register, spelling and pronunciation.

If you do this, you’ll find that your vocabulary will grow and you will be using the words with a lot more success.  Try some of the practice activities below and also look at the related videos about academic vocabulary, countability, and punctuation and spelling.