ENGLISH VOCABULARY

Is vocabulary usage a factor in miscommunication? Why?

Vocabulary is commonly defined as “all the words known and used by a particular
person.” Knowing a word, however, is not as simple as merely being able to recognize or use it.
There are several aspects of word knowledge that are used to measure word knowledge.

DEFINITION OF A WORD

Words can be defined in various ways, and estimates of vocabulary size differ depending
on the definition used. The most common definition of a lemma (the uninflected or dictionary
form; this includes walk, but not walks, walked or walking). Most of the time lemmas do not
include proper nouns (names of people, places, companies, etc). Another definition often used
in research of vocabulary size is that of word family. These are all the words that can be derived
from a ground word (e.g. the words effortless, effortlessly, effortful, effortfully are all part of the
word family effort). Estimates of vocabulary size range from as high as 200 thousand to as low
as 10 thousand, depending on the definition used.

Types of Vocabulary

 Reading Vocabulary – A literate person’s vocabulary is all the words he or she can
recognize when reading. This is generally the largest type of vocabulary simply because
a reader tends to be exposed to more words by reading than by listening.
 Listening Vocabulary – A person’s listening vocabulary is all the words he or she can
recognize when listening to speech. People may still understand words they were not
exposed to before using cues such as tone, gestures, the topic of discussion, and the
social context of the conversation.
 Speaking Vocabulary – A person’s speaking vocabulary is all the words he or she uses in
speech. It is likely to be a subset of the listening vocabulary. Due to the spontaneous
nature of speech, words are often misused. The misuse – though slight and
unintentional – may be compensated by facial expressions, tone of voice.
 Writing Vocabulary – Words are used in various forms of writing from formal essays to
social media feeds. Many written words do not commonly appear in speech. Writers
generally use a limited set of words when communicating. For example, if there are a
number of synonyms, a writer may have preference as to which of them to use, and
they are unlikely to use technical vocabulary relating to a subject in whom he has no
knowledge or interest.
Exercise 1. Think of words almost similar in meaning to the following words:

1. Love

2. Happy

3. Hate

4. Sad

5. Event