How to understand unfamiliar vocabulary

• Vocabulary means the words that make up a language.
• When reading, you are likely to come across words that you don't understand.
• Strategies can be used to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words, such as using the surrounding words to provide clues or breaking a word down.

There are lots of reasons why you might come across words that you don't know the meaning of. Language has changed over time, so older texts might contain unfamiliar words that are no longer commonly used. Or a text on a specific topic might contain technical terms that are only used in that area. Or it might just be one you haven't come across before. Discovering new words is part of the fun of reading and it gives you more words to use in your own writing.

It’s important to understand unfamiliar words so that you can interpret the overall meaning of a sentence. Misunderstanding a tricky word can prevent you from understanding a text’s meaning. If you have a dictionary then you can look up the meaning of a tricky word.

Find out more about how to use a dictionary.

Sometimes though you may not have a dictionary to hand so it's useful to have other ways to work out the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

How important is understanding vocabulary?

How many words are familiar?

It can help to look at the parts of a sentence before and after an unfamiliar word. Identifying whether a word is used as a noun, verb or an adjective can give a clue to its meaning.

The rest of the sentence will also give other clues. For example, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles:

Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out.

There are several words in the example that may be unfamiliar. Take ‘malignancy’, for instance. The words around it suggest that it means something negative. They imply that the heart of the man is ‘full’ of something ‘against’ people who have been cruel to him.

As well as looking at surrounding words, you may also get some clues by thinking of similar words that might be more familiar, like ‘malicious’, which means intending to do harm to others. This gets close to the meaning of the word ‘malignancy’ in this context, which means ‘wishing to do evil to others’.

Etymology is the study of word origins and how the meaning of words has changed. Taking an interest in the history of words can help you understand unfamiliar words.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Conan Doyle uses the word ‘immaterial’ which may be unfamiliar to some readers:

I knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial.

If you know that that ‘im’ is a prefix which often means 'not’ you can break down the word to help you work out the overall meaning:

• immature means not mature
• impossible means not possible
• impolite means not polite
• impatient means not patient

This knowledge may help the reader work out the meaning of the word ‘immaterial’. The etymology of the word would suggest that the meaning of ‘immaterial’ is ‘not material’. The surrounding words suggest that the word ‘immaterial’ contrasts with ‘essential’. This can be used to work out that this word means ‘not important’.

The root word is usually the main part of a word from which other words ‘grow’. A knowledge of root words can really help you work out the meaning of some unfamiliar words. For example:

• mono means one
• auto means self
• bio means life
• graph means write
• chrome means colour

Just using this list, could help you work out the meaning of ‘monochromatic’ which means ‘one colour’ and ‘autobiography’ which means ‘writing about your own life’.

Being curious about unfamiliar words will expand your own vocabulary and help you improve your writing and reading skills.