Building a Better Vocabulary

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some of our strategies as lifelong vocabulary learners: thinking

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and related words.

Leveraging Context

z As we’ve said, we pick up most of our new vocabulary knowledge

incidentally, from reading in context. Thus, reading for meaning is

one of the best things you can do to improve your vocabulary.

z Imagine that you’re reading a book, and you encounter the

following sentence: “Miles disliked his job, primarily because of

his bumptious boss.”

ż If you didn’t already know the meaning of bumptious, this

context wouldn’t be too supportive. You might get the idea

that bumptious is negative, but you wouldn’t know whether the

word meant conniving, wishy-washy, or something else.

ż The sentence doesn’t give you enough context to infer the

VSHFL¿FPHDQLQJRIbumptious, and in fact, research shows that

a single contextual encounter with an unfamiliar word isn’t

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z But if that’s true, how is it that we pick up most of our new

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words incrementally; this is the dimmer switch phenomenon we

discussed earlier. You may not be able to infer the meaning of

bumptiousDIWHU\RXU¿UVWHQFRXQWHUEXWHDFKWLPH\RXHQFRXQWHU

the word in a new context, its meaning gradually grows brighter in

your mental lexicon.

z You can take several steps to speed up this incremental process.

First, you can try to infer the meaning of the word from the

contextual information that surrounds it, and you can put that

information together with clues within the word, such as Latin and

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Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey suggest: “Look inside the word and

outside the word” for clues.