Beyond the Dictionary: Investigating New Vocabulary (To Help It Stick)

A recent webinar I held at our school shed light on what it takes to make new vocabulary stick. In other words, I talked about how to overcome the annoying state of understanding a word or a phrase perfectly well and then never using that same chunk while speaking. One of my key points was that the inability to use a chunk partly stems from a lack of understanding of how this chunk can be used.

At an advanced level, knowing a word means much more than being able to explain what it means. You also need to know what it can refer to (e.g., does a given adjective describe a person, a thing or a situation?), whether it’s emotionally charged, whether it belongs in a formal or informal context, and — perhaps most importantly — which words it naturally occurs with.

Knowing courage, for example, is one thing; knowing that English speakers can muster the courage to do something, pluck up the courage or have the courage to do something is another. Vocabulary knowledge is not just about breadth — how many words you recognise — but also about depth, or how well you know each word and how it behaves in context.

The problem is that our intuition isn't always a reliable guide, even less so for us as learners of a language. An expression may look perfectly logical but be uncommon, slightly unnatural or restricted to particular contexts. This is where corpus-based and usage-focused tools can help. Instead of guessing, we can look at large collections of real language and find out what people actually say: which combinations are common, how a phrase is used in context, which alternatives are more natural, and what an expression sounds like in real speech.

In this piece, we'll look at a few tools that can help you investigate new vocabulary more effectively — and turn “I know what this word means” into “I know how this word works.”

A dictionary can tell you what a word means, but advanced learners often need to answer a different question: How is this word actually used? Is a particular combination common? Which preposition follows it? Does it sound natural in conversation, or is it mainly found in formal writing? And if two expressions seem interchangeable, which one would people actually choose?

Ozdic: start with the collocations

Ozdic is one of our favourite places to start when the question is “What goes with this word?” Search for a word and you get its most useful collocations organised into categories such as adjective + noun, verb + noun, noun + verb and prepositional patterns. For example, looking up courage can help you move beyond the basic word itself and notice combinations such as pluck up the courage, have the courage to do something and it takes real courage to…. Ozdic also provides definitions, examples, thesaurus information and usage notes, so it can help you investigate several aspects of a word in one place. 

Our tip: if you have just learnt a new word, don't stop after reading the definition. Look it up in Ozdic and ask yourself: Which three or four combinations would actually be useful for me to remember?

Fraze It: see the word in action

Fraze It works more like a concordancer: it allows you to search for words and phrases and see them used in a large collection of sentences. This makes it particularly handy when you're unsure about a particular chunk, word order, preposition or collocation. You can also use it to compare different ways of saying something and see the contexts in which a word or phrase occurs. 

This is especially useful when your question is not “Is this grammatically possible?” but rather “Would people actually say this?”

Netspeak: when you can't decide between two versions

Netspeak is particularly useful for those moments when you have two or more possible combinations in your head and need to decide which one is more idiomatic. You can compare phrases directly and see their relative frequency. For example, if you're wondering whether make a decision or take a decision is more common in a particular context, Netspeak can give you evidence rather than forcing you to rely on intuition.

Another situation when Netspeak comes in handy is when there’s a phrase on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t remember what exact word is missing from it. In that case, I just insert what I remember from the phrase into the search bar and leave a question mark in place of the word that has slipped my mind.  

YouGlish: hear it in real speech

YouGlish is slightly different because it brings vocabulary into spoken language. Enter a word or phrase and it finds clips from YouTube in which it is actually used. You can hear the expression in context, notice pronunciation, stress and intonation, and explore different varieties of English. YouGlish currently allows searches across a range of accents, including British, American, Australian, Canadian, Irish, Scottish and New Zealand English. 

This makes it particularly useful for chunks that you understand perfectly well on paper but have never actually heard being used. Try searching for the whole phrase, not just the individual word: muster the courage, a one-trick pony, or for a hot minute will tell you much more than searching for courage, pony or minute in isolation.

Thesaurus Plus: explore other ways of expressing ideas behind words

Thesaurus Plus is useful when you're trying to find alternatives and related vocabulary, rather than simply checking a single definition. It provides synonyms and antonyms, related words and, importantly for our purposes, examples and common collocations.

Its most unique and valuable feature is side-by-side comparisons of the profiles of the word you entered into the search bar and one of its synonyms. 

There is, however, one important caveat: a synonym is not necessarily a replacement. If you look up hassle, for example, you'll find inconvenience among its related words, but that doesn't mean you can simply substitute one for the other in every sentence. Use a thesaurus to generate possibilities, then go back to a dictionary or corpus to investigate how those possibilities actually behave.

Don't use all five every time

The point isn't to turn every new word into a 20-minute research project. That would be a rather efficient way of making vocabulary learning unbearable.

Instead, think of these tools as answering different questions:

• What words naturally go with this one? Try Ozdic
• How is this word/phrase used in real sentences? Try Fraze It
• Which of these two options is more common? Try Netspeak
• How does this sound in actual speech? Try YouGlish
• What other words could I use, and how are they related? Try Thesaurus Plus

And perhaps the most useful habit is to stop treating these tools as answer machines. Use them to investigate language. If you come across muster the courage, don't simply copy the definition into your vocabulary notebook. Look at a few examples, notice what tends to follow it, listen to someone saying it, and then decide whether it is a chunk worth adding to your active vocabulary.

That small shift — from “What does this word mean?” to “What can I learn about how this word works?” — is one of the most useful things advanced learners can do.

Finding out how a word works is only one part of making it stick. In the next pieces, we'll look at what to do with that knowledge: how to retrieve new vocabulary from memory, how to revisit it so that it doesn't disappear after a few days, and how to create opportunities to actually use it.