Useful Websites for Vocabulary Learning – Medium Frequency ‘General’ Vocabulary

In the last blog post, I explained how you could use dictionaries and text checkers to identify useful vocabulary to learn and remember. In that post, I focused on the 3,000 most frequent words in English. However, to get to higher levels of English, achieve a high score on the IELTS and to be able to read academic texts at university, you will need to know a lot more than 3,000 words.

According to Nation (2006), you need to have a vocabulary of about 6,000 to 7,000 words in order to have a good understanding (98% of all words) of a spoken text such as a movie, whereas for written texts such as novels and newspapers, this increases to about 8,000 to 9,000 words.

Before deciding on what words to focus on, it might also be useful for you to do a vocabulary size test. You can do one at this website and it should take less than one hour to complete.

You might also be interested to know how many words you need to know to be at each level of English. Now, this is a difficult question to answer as it depends on how you measure when a learner knows a word. For example, there will be a big difference between receptive vocabulary (what you can understand, i.e. in reading and listening) and productive vocabulary (what you can use, i.e. in speaking and writing).

 The only research paper I could find gave the following estimates for vocabulary sizes:

However, I am a little unsure of these numbers, especially at the higher levels as most C1 level learners could probably understand most words in a film and even in novels that are not too difficult. Therefore, I would expect the vocabulary level to be higher at both C1 and C2 level, especially as very few learners ever achieve a C2 level of English.

Although this is not an academic source, so perhaps less reliable, I found the following discussion online and I feel that some of the estimates here to be more realistic, e.g.

This estimate suggests that the number of words required doubles to reach the next level rather than increasing by about 500 words for each level. Although this is not based on any research evidence, the above estimates do seem to be more likely than the previous estimates, especially for the higher levels.

As a useful reference, the image below shows roughly how the different CEFR levels (A1-C2) relate to the IELTS exam. Whichever scale from above you use, it is clear that you are going to need over 3,000 words to achieve a score of 6.5 or higher on the IELTS test.

In the previous post, I mentioned the Oxford 3000 list. There is also an Oxford 5000 word list, so if you think you know most of the words at the 3,000 word level, then it would be worth focusing on the additional 2,000 word on the Oxford 5000 list.

As with the Oxford 3000, we can also use a text checker to find out what words are on the Oxford 5000 list by copying and pasting a text into the box, e.g. below shows the results (up to B1 level) for the Oxford 3000 list.

And below shows the results for the Oxford 5000 list (B2 and C1 level), not including all the words at in the Oxford 3000 list.

Another dictionary that I didn’t mention in my previous blog post is the Macmillan Dictionary. This dictionary uses a system of red stars to indicate frequency. To summarise:

• 3 stars = 0-2,500 most common words
• 2 star = 2,500-5,000 most common words
• 1 star = 5,000-7,500 most common words

For example, by searching for the word ‘analysis’, we can see that it is one of the most common 2,500 words in English as it has three stars next to it:

If we search for the word ‘magnificent’, we can see that it is slightly less common, but still one of the most common 5,000 words in English as it has two stars next to it:

The following YouTube video gives a very clear and easy to understand overview of the red star system for Macmillan dictionary:

If you want to expand your vocabulary learning a bit further, you can use the Longman dictionary to help you find slightly less common words than in the Macmillan dictionary.

As mentioned previously, the Longman dictionary has red circles next to each word to indicate frequency. Here:

• 3 circles = 0-3,000 most common words (High frequency)
• 2 star = 3,000-6,000 most common words (Medium frequency)
• 1 star = 6,000-9,000 most common words (Lower frequency)

As with the Oxford dictionary, there is a vocabulary checker tool, which can highlight words at different levels as well as words from the AWL (Academic Word List), e.g.

However, vocabulary lists are probably more useful when they are either for higher frequency words (as the lists are more likely to be accurate) and for specific vocabulary. Therefore, you should be careful about using these lists as the reliability of these lists depends on the kind of texts that have been used to create a database of language. Whilst I would assume that these dictionaries have quite reliable databases, there will be some differences, especially for lower frequency vocabulary as they won’t have used exactly the same texts.

It is also worth mentioning that this kind of self-study activity should only be one part of your vocabulary learning. An even bigger part of your vocabulary learning should be through getting lots of input as I have shown in previous blog posts (see here and here).

In the next few blog posts, I will focus more on strategies that can help you remember vocabulary.

References:

Milton, J., & Alexiou, T. (2009). Vocabulary size and the common European framework of reference for languages. In Vocabulary studies in first and second language acquisition (pp. 194-211). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Nation, I.S.P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59-82.