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.

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.

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.