11 Free Resources to Improve English Vocabulary

Building a large vocabulary is a big part of becoming an excellent English speaker. You can be a star with verbs and know how to use personal pronouns perfectly, but you also need to know the words for things you see and hear while out in the world, or words that relate to things you enjoy or do every day. There are many ways to improve English vocabulary, including by reading books and using a dictionary to look up words you don’t recognize, but there are also plenty of online resources available. Here are 11 great ones:

11 Free Resources to Improve English Vocabulary

If you want to make sure you know all of the 1000 most commonly-used words in English, this is the place to go! Click on a word to see its definition and work your way through the alphabet. Challenge yourself to learn all the unfamiliar words under a single letter in a week, then move on to the next one.

This site has a great library of simple games to help children and beginners learn vocabulary words. Play Hangmouse (guess letters and fill in the blanks, like hangman), ESL Homophones (a memory game with words that sound alike), Unscramble (put the letters in the right order to form a word) or Crossword (fill in the blanks with the correct words using clues) to help you learn new words and remember ones you’ve already learned. This is a great free resource to improve English vocabulary.

The British Council’s LearnEnglish site also has some games aimed at adult learners. These use photographs to help you identify the correct word and reinforce its meaning. Learn words associated with food, activities, animals, clothes, and everyday objects. You can also have the game read each word to you out loud so that you learn to pronounce it properly.

ManyThings.org has an extensive vocabulary support section including a wide variety of word lists on various topics, plus games, quizzes, and puzzles using each of those lists. The link above will take you to the ESL/EFL Basic Vocabulary lists, but there are more comprehensive lists available for advanced English learners who want to improve English vocabulary.

ESL Gold has a great academic vocabulary list that could prove extremely helpful to college students learning English while studying at the post-secondary level. The list is organized alphabetically and has definitions and meanings right next to the word, so you can immediately get the point.

If you’re interested in knowing exactly how strong your vocabulary already is, the folks at the Merriam-Webster dictionary have developed an online vocabulary quiz for you to try. The language level is solidly intermediate or above, though, so beginners and advanced beginners might prefer to try Test Your Vocab instead. This text simply asks you to identify words you are familiar with and know the meaning of by ticking boxes. It’s part of an independent research project and they are looking for more results, especially from people under 15 years of age, so children and young teens are encouraged to participate!

Merriam-Webster has also developed a list of 3,000 core vocabulary words that they believe are essential for English learners to know. They are grouped by category and each word is clickable to see its definition. Featured categories include sports, air travel, jobs/professions, health, and family members. If your goal is to improve English vocabulary fast, this is a great place to start.

Woodward English Vocabulary Lists organizes their words into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels and then by topic. They use pictures, games, and videos to illustrate the words’ meanings and offer some clever usage tips as well (for example, when to use the different plural forms fruit and fruits). (Note that this site is also the home of an English school but the vocabulary resources are excellent and all free to use. There’s no need to sign up for anything, so you can ignore the little “start now” icon.)

Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day is fun and can be added as an app to your smartphone, where it will send you alerts when the newest word is posted. These words can be quite advanced and diffcult, but for intermediate students and above it offers a nice challenge. This resource also tells you a bit about the origin of the word, which is interesting and may help you remember it more easily.

Finally, Duolingo, which is free and available both on computer and mobile devices (and allows you to switch back and forth between them on the same account) turns language learning into a game by letting you earn virtual rewards and watch your scores improve. The program is available with instructions in many different languages so no matter what your native tongue is, you can play. Vocabulary learning includes pictures and images as well as hearing the word spoken out loud with proper pronunciation.

As you add new words to your vocabulary, it’s important to practice using them correctly so that they stay in your memory. As we say in English: use it or lose it! Ask your teacher to help you include new vocabulary words during your Online English lessons, and he or she might even have suggestions for related words that you will find useful!

September 13, 2016