In the last post, we talked about how you can use magazine articles, trade journals, and graduate thesis papers to expand your vocabulary in a specific area of study or research. These are valuable resources because the vocabulary words are both targeted to those fields and used correctly in context in the discussions and explanations contained in the text.

Knowing how to use a word correctly is just as important as knowing the word in the first place. Not only will misuse of a word confuse your listeners or readers, but it will give them the impression that you are lacking in knowledge that you may actually have. When you’re learning a new word, be sure to include in your exercises the creation of sample sentences so that you get familiar with using the word in context.

If you’re not sure exactly how to use a word, you can find examples on line. If you’re using the Ultimate Vocabulary software, the Word Discover™ “50 Power Examples” feature is a quick and easy way to see how each word is correctly used in context. Because many words have secondary meanings, or can be used in slightly different ways, the more examples you have to look at, the better.

The examples provided through the Ultimate Vocabulary software include phrases taken from business and news journals – ideal for a professional’s use – as well as examples of how the word is used in narrative or fiction. Look for a wide range of sample sentences and study them until you’re confident you know how to use the word correctly.

When you find an example of a phrase using the target vocabulary word(s) you’re studying, mark or highlight them (on paper) or cut and paste them (on line) into your vocabulary study journal, or onto the flash cards you use for vocabulary review. Once you have a good variety of examples, make up your own sample sentences for practice.

One of the most valuable resources for a student or professional is the wide range of on-line and print trade publications, magazines, journals, and newspapers that are available in many fields and areas of study. Even if you only have a hobbyist’s interest in a certain topic – woodworking or botany, languages or music theory – reading about the research and discoveries made by others in that area will help you expand your own knowledge, perhaps filling in gaps you didn’t realize were there.

From the point of view of learning vocabulary, these publications are excellent references for review of topical words and phrases. When you read through an article, keep notes on vocabulary words you’re not familiar with so that you can look them up later. In some fields of study, the terminology will not change much over time; in others, new discoveries might add new words to the vocabulary every year.

A good source of information in nearly any area of research is the collection of research papers and thesis papers that are collected and stored at universities. Because these generally focus on a narrower area of study, you can often find specific information and vocabulary in these documents, and may be able to find papers that address the precise topic you’re interested in.

For a more general overview of a field or discipline, look for trade journals and newsletters. These will often be created and sponsored by professional organizations, but also by individuals with expertise and interest in the field. Here are a few you might find interesting:

• American Journal of Agricultural Economics
• Food & Drink Weekly
• Tattoo Artist Magazine
• Professional Photographer’s Association Magazine
• International Journal of Industrial Organization

You can use the knowledge you gain and the new words you learned in your own presentations, documentation, other professional correspondence; however, if you are using someone else’s research or study, remember to include citations and references to their work.

The process of learning any language is one of growth and evolution, where things learned at the beginning of the study program form the basis for things learned later. When you’re working on English vocabulary improvement, you might be tempted to start at the top, with the biggest, fanciest words you can find, learning those and trying to work them into your conversations. While that might work sometimes, you may feel more confident about using your new vocabulary if you have a firmer foundation to build on.

If you’re using the Ultimate Vocabulary software, you’ll appreciate the Word Discover™ feature that sorts words by their levels of difficulty. Because vocabulary study is a cumulative process, learning the lower-level words will give you a good overview of the shared word roots and characteristics that will help you learn, understand, and correctly use the more difficult and less common words at the higher levels.

Every word you learn will be of benefit to you, but it’s a fact that you’ll end up having the opportunity to use some words more often than others. It’s only practical in a general English vocabulary improvement project to devote more time – at least at first – to learning a larger number of more general words that you’ll use more often than in spending your study hours only looking at the most difficult and specific vocabulary words which you might only rarely have occasion to use in conversation.

One of the primary goals of a good vocabulary improvement course is to raise the overall quality and quantity of your vocabulary, so that your presentations and conversations as a whole become more polished, adept, and refined. In general, you’ll make more of an impression on people if you can consistently speak well on a variety of subjects, rather than being the person who occasionally comes up with a unique (and possible unknown to the rest of the group) vocabulary word.

Here’s a metaphor for you: if a chef at a fancy restaurant served you a bowl of plain, unsalted mashed potatoes, but added a gold-leaf-sprinkled cube of foie gras on top, would you consider that a gourmet meal, or would you just think it was odd? Having a working vocabulary that’s at the plain-mashed-potato level and inserting the occasional “fifty-dollar word” may give people the same impression. Now, there’s nothing wrong with mashed potatoes! They’re a nutritious and inexpensive meal. But think about all the things you can add: salt, butter, chopped fresh herbs, some grated aged parmesan cheese, shaved black truffles – you can see we’re working our way up to that cube of foie gras, but gradually, so that it will seem an enhancement rather than an out-of-place item. Work on your vocabulary in the same way, so that you can offer people a dish of top-quality, deliciously descriptive words at every conversational meal.

If you’re in the northern hemisphere (below the Arctic Circle, at least), it’s probably pretty hot today, and you might find yourself dragging a bit, both physically and mentally, disinclined to do anything that requires any energy and uninterested in any situation that doesn’t involve a cool breeze, ice water, and a lot of sitting around. In these dog days¹ of August, many people experience this lassitude due to the high temperatures. Lassitude means a lack of energy or enthusiasm, and can be due to physical fatigue (from illness or overexertion, perhaps) or mental fatigue (a feeling of being burned out²). Synonyms for lassitude include listlessness and lethargy.

Example: The children ran around the yard playing all morning, but by afternoon they had succumbed to lassitude and spent the rest of the day sitting in the shade.

If you’ve been working hard on your studies, you might be feeling tired and lethargic, and ready for a break. Don’t be afraid of taking some time off now and then to refresh your mind and body. While it’s important to maintain a regular routine in order to guarantee a steady progress towards an improved and expanded vocabulary, it’s also important to balance that routine with rest and relaxation. Don’t forget that you can continue to increase your vocabulary knowledge by reading for fun – a good book enjoyed on the beach will add to your word base just like an hour-long targeted memorization drill does. Of course, we encourage you to slip a few flash cards into your beach bag as well, for a few minutes of quick review here and there!

¹ According to legend, the Romans first referred to these hot summer days as the “dog days” (dies caniculares) because of the prominence of the star Sirius, the “Dog Star” and the brightest star in the sky during this time.

² The idiomatic expression “to burn out” means to reach the end of one’s energy (again, either physical or mental) for a given period of time or a specific project.

In our posts on how you can improve your vocabulary, we’ve talked about the importance of expanding your vocabulary to include descriptive adjectives so that your conversations will be colorful and your presentations piquant. Adjectives, however, don’t stand alone. The purpose of an adjective is to modify, or describe, a noun. For example, the adjective blue can be used to modify the noun sky (the blue sky). An adjective can also modify another adjective (the cerulean blue sky).

Unlike adjectives, which are frequently open to interpretation and nuance – if you say something is tall, do you mean taller than me, or over six meters, or something else? – nouns are fixed, concrete terms, or names (the word comes from the Latin word nomen, or “name”) for specific things. Part of improving and expanding your vocabulary comes down to the simple task of learning and memorizing these names.

This memorization of names is something that everyone does when they’re learning a language. Whether you’re a young child learning the words cat and book and ice cream, or a university physics student learning the varieties of subatomic particles (which include quarks and leptons and bosons, in case you’re wondering), you are, as we all are, engaged in a process of identifying things and learning what to call them. Part of this learning process is knowing the difference between the singular and plural forms of the nouns which, in English, is not always easy to determine.

The easiest way to form a plural noun is to add an -s to the end of the word, or -es if the word already ends in an s-sound (which for this purpose also includes the ch-, sh- and x-sounds). Most nouns will follow this pattern.

Other nouns are irregular – that is, their plural forms do not match the -s or -es standard format.

Some nouns revert back to their Latin or Greek roots when pluralized.

If the noun ends in a -y (other than proper nouns like Saturday or January), then the standard plural form uses -ies.

Over the course of time, as the English language has grown and changed, some words have lost their singular form, or the meaning of the forms has changed. For example, you might have seen signs in front of shops that offer “sundries” for sale. If you go into that shop and ask to purchase a sundry, though, you’ll get nothing but a puzzled look. The word sundry as a noun (meaning something separate or apart) is no longer used, but its plural form sundries is used and means “miscellany, odds and ends.”

Do you have questions about the plural form of a noun? Leave your questions in the comments section.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning. – Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), October 1888

As we pointed out in the last post, having a large and varied vocabulary allows you to choose and use words that precisely convey the information you need to communicate, in the tone and style that is most effective for each occasion. The more words you know, the more flexibility you have, and your conversations and presentations will always fit the situation.

There are other ways to add interest to your written and spoken communication, including onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor. These tools are used by professional writers to improve the quality of their writing, to catch and hold the reader’s interest, and to add a rich dimension to the text by bringing in the reader’s other senses with mental imagery. Although you might associate these techniques with fiction and poetry, and think they have no place in a professional presentation, if you use them skillfully and subtly, your audience will be attracted to your speech without even realizing why.

Onomatopoeia means the use of a word that sounds like what it is describing (from the Greek roots onoma, “name,” and poieo, “to make”). For example, think about the sound that the leaves and branches of a tree make when the wind blows through them. What words come to mind? We thought of the words rustle and swish. When you say them out loud, your voice imitates the sound of the leaves brushing against each other in the breeze. Using onomatopoeia – especially in a spoken presentation – will paint an aural picture of the topic or scene you’re describing, and your audience will listen more closely.

Alliteration is a technique frequently used by poets, but it can be very effective in any text. Adept application of advanced approaches such as alliteration will accelerate you towards attaining your goal as an author. And that’s alliteration: using words in sequence that start with the same sound, to add rhythm and emphasis.

Think about the last conference you attended where multiple people were speaking. What attracted you to a specific speaker? Especially in corporate or academic settings, a good speech is an oasis of refreshment in the middle of a wasteland of dry, uninteresting presentations. That’s an example of metaphor: creating a visual image for the reader (or listener) that compares one thing to something completely different, without using the words “like” or “as” (which would make the comparison a simile). Just as a pool of cool, clear water refreshes the traveler in the desert, metaphors will provide contrast and relief in what otherwise might be a technically dense or plainly factual presentation.

What techniques do you use to spice up your speeches?

In the last post, you learned that clowder is a term (a “collective noun,” to give it the proper linguistic name) for a group of cats. While saying “a group of cats” is certainly accurate, it’s a generic phrase, and not very interesting to your audience, though it does convey the information you’re trying to communicate. Because you can refer to “a group of” many different things, it’s useful to have specific, descriptive words for such groups, to add color and interest to your conversations and presentations. Here are a few others you might find useful and fun:

• cavalcade: a group of people riding on horseback (and their horses)
• gaggle: a group of geese (not flying)
• skein: a group of geese (flying)
• pantheon: a group of gods and/or goddesses

Other nouns that describe groups of things include agglomeration (a group of unrelated objects piled together), phalanx (a group of people standing close together), and smorgasbord (a varied group of things from which you can pick and choose).

Collective nouns are only one class of descriptive words and phrases that you can use to enliven your communications. The English language is filled with adjectives that you can use to give colorful details.

• Are you describing someone who is very sad? That person can be anguished, wretched, or sorrowful.
• Do you have a difficult task? Then it’s probably burdensome or worrisome, and you might even find it traumatic.
• Is your assistant a hard worker? They’re zealous, thorough, competent, and productive.

We’ve discussed similes before, but it’s worth repeating: a presentation that doesn’t take advantage of these descriptive phrases can be as uninteresting as a bowl of cold oatmeal. Using comparisons and similes will catch your audience’s attention, and give them another perspective on your topic. In addition, you’ll often be adding a visual element (if only an imagined one) that will engage their senses and increase their focus on what you’re saying, or what you’ve written.

In the next post, we’ll talk about some other poetic devices that you can use to create engaging and entertaining presentations, add interest to your conversations, and improve and develop your writing style.

If your first language is not English, focusing on learning new vocabulary words might be more work than you think you have time for. However, because you’ve been looking at English as a puzzle to solve, you’re already in the right frame of mind to add bigger and more elaborate pieces to that puzzle. In addition, your skill at looking closely and carefully at words to understand them will help you focus on the important word roots that will tie groups of words together and give you a jump-start on an even larger vocabulary.

If you’re using the Ultimate Vocabulary program as a tool in your vocabulary-building work, then you’re already familiar with the Word Discover™ feature that translates key vocabulary in into different languages. By cross-checking the translation with the definition of the word that you’ve looked up in the English dictionary, you’ll be sure to have an accurate definition and a better understanding of the meaning of the word and how to use it. If you don’t have the Ultimate Vocabulary program, you can check one of the many on-line multilingual dictionaries – WordReference.com is one of the top resources for the major European languages, and the Google Translate function covers most of the world’s other languages.

One of the best ways to learn new vocabulary is by reading as much as you can. By using translated texts along with those in your native language, you can compare words and phrases easily, and see how vocabulary words are used in context. Many used book stores have translations of non-English literature, especially those located near colleges and universities. Pick up a copy of a book in the language you grew up with, and a copy of a good English translation, and read the English version, using the original text to confirm your understanding of the words.

Even after you’ve developed a broad and comprehensive vocabulary, you’ll want to make sure that your professional documents – letters of application, scholarship proposals, business contracts, and the like – are completely accurate, both to maintain your status as an authority, and to ensure that there are no mistranslations by your readers that could end up costing you time or money. Look for a professional translator to proofread your work before you submit it or mail it out. You’ll have the confidence of knowing that you’re presenting your best work and will be able to look forward to a successful and profitable outcome.

As your vocabulary improves and expands, you’ll be able to speak with authority on many different topics. People will be impressed by your knowledge and insight, and will consider you to be quite perspicacious when you’re able to pick exactly the right words for every situation. Perspicacious means keen-witted and mentally sharp, able to see to the heart of a matter and discern the truth. The word comes from the Latin perspicax, meaning “able to see through,” which contains the Latin root specere, meaning “to look at.” Other words derived from this root word include specimen, introspection, and perspective – all words that have the connotation of “sight.” The noun perspicacity refers to perception or shrewdness. Some synonyms for perspicacious are discerning and insightful.

Example: The witness tried to hide the truth, but the attorney’s perspicacious questions forced him to admit to his role in the bank robbery.

A related but less common word, perspicuous, means “obvious or apparent.” While perspicacious has the meaning of “seeing what is hidden,” perspicuous has the meaning “not hidden at all.” Even though somewhat reversed, the underlying sense from the root specere of “sight” is still evident.

Learning root words is very useful, because it helps you quickly get a sense of the probable definition of a new word. You can look at the word root(s), as well as any prefix or suffix, and piece together a translation for the word as a whole. Now that you know that the Latin root word specere means “sight,” how would you define these words?

• circumspect
• speculation
• conspicuous

Circumspect has two Latin roots, circum- (“around”) and specere (“to look”). Someone who is circumspect acts carefully after looking at, or considering, the situation.

The original meaning of speculation is “to look at or consider,” with the sense that a person is thinking about a topic seriously. The word is also used now to mean less than serious consideration; the phrase “idle speculation” refers to more random thought, or even guessing, about something.

Something that is conspicuous is very visible; the Latin prefix con- (or com-) means “together with” and is used in this case to show intensity or emphasis. A modern translation might be “visible squared.”

As you can see, being familiar with root words helps you get right down to the fundamental blocks making up a vocabulary word to quickly get a clear idea of what that word actually means. You might even say that learning word roots will help you be more perspicacious.

A good dictionary is a valuable tool that will help you quickly learn almost everything about a word: how to pronounce it, where it comes from, how it’s used, and what other words are related to it. The Ultimate Vocabulary system’s Word Discover™ program contains a Definitions Database of over 140,000 useful and powerful vocabulary words, and all the information you need to successfully add those words to your own vocabulary and use them correctly.

Most good on-line and paper dictionaries share at least half a dozen separate features. We’ve taken an excerpt from the on-line dictionary at Dictionary.com for the entry “definition” to show you what to look for, and what some of the features mean.

As you can see from this example, the sample sentences are not shown (though there is a link to them) and the entry provides no synonyms or antonyms. If you’re using the Ultimate Vocabulary system, you’ll be able to click over to those features, and also use the “My Word Notes” feature to add your own comments, example sentences, and questions to research. If you’re using a paper or other on-line dictionary, add those things to your journal or word list notebook. You’ll be on the way to creating your own reference for future use.