Building Vocabulary for Reading and Speaking

Given the amount of reading you are expected to do during your academic studies, it is not very efficient to stop reading in order to look up the meaning of every unknown word that you encounter. Unless the purpose of your reading is to gain an in-depth understanding of every part of a text, you will need to use various strategies to guess the meaning of unknown vocabulary.

Other than examining the word itself, pay attention to the context in which the word is situated. This might involve:

• looking elsewhere in a text for a definition or explanation,
• using the sentence in which the word is located to guess its meaning, or
• using a paragraph or larger section of text to guess the meaning of the word.

Look for a definition/explanation

The simplest way to guess the meaning of an unknown word is to determine whether the author has provided a definition or explanation somewhere in the text.

Imagine that you were assigned the following article to read:

Kim, J.Y., & Meister, A. (2023). Microaggressions, interrupted: The experience and effects of gender 
    microaggressions for women in STEM. Journal of Business Ethics, 185, 513-531.

On page 514, you read, “First, we advance the microaggression literature through an in-depth qualitative study, in which we identify common gender microaggressions in STEM…”

You want to know the meaning of “gender microaggressions,” which is defined on page 515:

Gender microaggressions are defined as brief (hence ‘micro’) and regularly experienced verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that—often unintentionally—communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights toward women (Nadal, 2008, p. 23; Sue et al., 2008).

While this strategy is about finding, rather than guessing, the meaning of new vocabulary, it does require you to be patient with not knowing a word/phrase immediately.

Use the sentence

When it is not possible to find a definition/explanation, use the context of a sentence to guess the meaning of an unknown word.

Let’s use the definition of gender microaggressions provided by Kim and Meister (2023) as an example once again:

Gender microaggressions are defined as brief (hence ‘micro’) and regularly experienced verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that—often unintentionally—communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights toward women (Nadal, 2008, p. 23; Sue et al., 2008) (p. 515).

While you now know what gender microaggressions are, you might not know what “indignities” means. Use information from the sentence to give you a sense of its general meaning:

1. You know that it is a noun because the adjectives “verbal,” “behavioral,” and “environmental” appear before it.
2. It is in plural form as it describes gender microaggressions, which are also plural.
3. It likely describes a bad action since “hostile, “derogatory,” “negative, and “slights” appear later in the sentence, which are all negative words.

Therefore, you can confidently guess that “indignities” refers to actions that make others feel bad in some way.

Use the larger text

There may be cases where you need to look at a larger section of a text to guess the meaning of a word.

Let’s use another part from Kim and Meister’s (2023) article to practice:

Receiving ally support helped restore the women’s confidence about their technical competence, helping them transition to a positive state. In recalling how receiving external support from a senior leader ally dispelled her self-doubts about her technical ability and consequently her qualifications for a promotion, one software engineer shared this realization… (p. 524).

In the first sentence of this excerpt, you encounter the word “ally” and do not know what it means. What information could you gather to figure out its general meaning?

1. Based on the first sentence, “ally” seems to have a positive meaning because it appears before the word “support” and the whole sentence describes how the women of the study regained confidence in themselves.
2. The appearance of “ally” after “senior leader” in the second sentence suggests that “ally” refers to a type of person and is thus a noun.
3. The second sentence also describes how the software engineer received external support from the ally to erase her self-doubt as a professional, which suggests that an ally does something positive for someone else.

Therefore, you should be able to guess that “ally” refers to a person who provides help to someone else in order to resolve a negative state or situation.

To guess the meaning of an unknown word, examine the word itself. Break down the word into its prefix, root, and/or suffix or simply make an educated guess based on your existing vocabulary knowledge.

Break down the word into its various parts

Imagine that you have to guess the meaning of the word "ambidextrous." Divide the word into its prefix (the beginning of the word that gives some clue about its meaning), root (the part of the word which gives its primary meaning), and suffix (the ending of the word which indicates word class):

• ambi- = a prefix meaning "both"
• dextr- = a root meaning "righthand"
• -ous = and adjective suffix meaning "full of" or "possessing"

Based on your knowledge of these various parts, you can guess that "ambidextrous" pertains to possessing two "right hands." If we understand that the dominant hand of most people is their right hand, then we can guess that "ambidextrous" means being able to use one’s left and right hands equally well.

Since many prefixes, roots, and suffixes in English are derived from Greek and Latin, invest some time looking at the most frequently used ones. Wikipedia provides a list of Greek and Latin roots in English.

Make an educated guess

Oftentimes, an unknown word may be a part of a word family that you already know. For example, imagine that you do not know the meaning of "coincide," but you know the meaning of "coincidence," the noun form of the word.

If you remember that "coincidence" refers to two events happening together without an apparent connection, you might be able to guess that "coincide" means to happen at the same time.

However, it is important to note that this guess does not necessarily help you understand the nuanced distinction between the noun and verb. Whereas "coincidence" relates to a remarkable co-occurrence of two events, "coincide" does not emphasize this remarkableness. But once again, the purpose of guessing the meaning of a word is to get a general sense of its meaning rather than a complete definition.