Five ways to work out the meaning of new words

When you read and listen in English, you'll see and hear new words. It could be frustrating if you stop what you're doing all the time to check them in a dictionary or translate them.

Instead, try to guess their meaning! Here are five ways to do it.

1. Use your general knowledge.

What would be usual in this situation? Imagine that you're taking a bus or train, and the driver says:

This is the last stop. All passengers, please alight here.

If you don't know what alight means, you can guess that it means 'get off', since that's the normal thing to do at the last stop.

2. Break the word into parts.

Let's say you don't know the word deemed here:

The film was not deemed appropriate for young children.

Deemed ends in -ed, so it seems to be a past verb form. It also comes after was, which suggests it's a past participle inside a passive structure. So, we know that deemed is some kind of effect or result happening to the film.

Look for prefixes too. For example, if somebody says this while you're speaking:

Sorry, can I just interject?

We can guess interject means to speak while someone else is speaking or to interrupt because it has the prefix inter-, meaning 'between' or 'in the middle' (e.g. international, internet).

3. Check the surrounding vocabulary.

The words before and after an unknown word sometimes give clues to its meaning.

For example, in The film was not deemed appropriate, you may already know that appropriate means 'suitable' or 'right', which is a kind of opinion or judgement. We can therefore guess that deemed means something like 'considered' or 'judged'.

Here's a more complicated example.

Passing my driving test was a huge achievement! Doing it on my first try was just the icing on the cake.

Let's say we don't know what icing is. But by looking at the surrounding words, we see that it's related to cake. We can also guess there is an idiomatic (that is, non-literal) meaning here, because cake doesn't mean anything obvious in this situation.

So, the question is not just 'What does icing mean?' but 'What does the icing on the cake mean?'

To answer this, from general knowledge we know that passing a test is good, and that passing on the first try is even better. So we can guess that the icing on the cake means something like 'something was already good (passing the test / cake), and it became even better (passing on the first try / icing)'.

4. Check the surrounding link words.

Link words such as because and whereas give us clues because they connect one idea with another. For example, suppose you don't know the meaning of touch and go here:

It was touch and go for a while whether they would lose their jobs.

The conjunction whether suggests that the two results (losing or keeping their jobs) were both possible, so we can guess that touch and go has something to do with an uncertain result.

5. Check whether the meaning is explained.

Sometimes people explain words or repeat them in other terms.

In Japan I tried matcha, which is a type of green tea.

She's a real live wire! She just can't sit still.

Look out for phrases such as which is, what I mean is or in other words, which show that the speaker or writer is re-explaining something.
 

Next time you see or hear a new word, guess its meaning! Use all the methods above, and don't rely on just one.