Increase Your English Vocabulary: 5 Places to Find New Words

Executive summary about How to Improve Vocabulary by Kelly Tracy

Growing your English vocabulary is key to improving all of your language skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Different students prefer different techniques, and a combination of techniques is best. 

Record the new words you encounter every day, both the ones you read and the ones you hear. 

Learn word roots, beginnings, and endings. Many English words share parts with the same meaning, especially words with Greek or Latin origins. For example, "hydro" means "water" and is found in many English words like dehydrate, hydroelectric, and hydraulics. Studying a list of English word roots, beginnings, and endings will unlock a huge amount of vocabulary.

Study word lists that have been designed by experts to give you a good core vocabulary. For beginning to low-intermediate student, try the 2000-word General Service List. High-intermediate and advanced students should already be familiar with these words and move on to the 570 word families of the Academic Word list, selected by their frequency in academic texts.

Learn vocabulary by theme. Are you interested in baseball? You can use the same easy method to discover vocabulary lists for topics from economics to coffee.

Study word families. For example, if you learn the verb negotiate, it's easy to add the noun negotiation and the adjective negotiable and nonnegotiable. A good English dictionary lists other parts of speech for many words.

Advantages and Disadvantages of an Online English Dictionary

There are various reliable internet tools such as online English dictionaries, programs for grammar checking, and other processing tools. Besides the convenience, online dictionaries instantly eliminate the limitations of printed reference materials. Online English dictionaries are auto-updated; in fact this is the main advantage of online dictionaries over printed ones. An online dictionary is updated easily. It means that every new word or terminology can be added in the database of online dictionary. 

One of the best qualities of such dictionaries is the translation feature, e.g. an online dictionary can translate an English word into Italian and vice versa. One of the drawbacks of these online dictionaries, however, is the dependability of the source. An online dictionary is a great tool of information, especially if we know how to distinguish a good online dictionary from a bad one. Also many of us view online dictionary as supplements to print dictionaries and not a replacement. We often forget that the dictionary gives the meaning of the word.