Word of the Day - learning English one word at a time
Word of the Day sites and apps give you one vocabulary word to learn each day. These are good for the train or when you have a spare minute while waiting for a class to begin. If you can get into the habit of learning just ONE WORD each day, think how great your vocabulary will be when you graduate! Get an app for your smart phone and get busy!
Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary
Merriam-Webster is a well-known dictionary publisher. This site is the Learner's Dictionary, so words should be about right for English language learners. You can hear the pronunciation of the word by clicking on the red speaker icon next to the word. |
Dictionary.com
This site can be used on a PC, or you can get the free app with Word of the Day for your smart phone. |
Use this site on your PC, or you can use your smart phone browser to find it.
|
New York Times
The words on this site come from the New York Times. They are not meant specifically for ESL learners, so the level may be a little high. On the other hand, if you want to score well on TOEIC or TOEFL, the words learned here will be very useful. Gambatte! |
Word of the Day for Smart Phones
Check your App Store on your smart phone and search for Word of the Day apps. There are free ones available, or you can pay a little money to get a good one with interesting and useful features.
Word a Day (below) by Dynamically Loaded costs ¥120, but it looks like a worthwhile app.
Word Lists - Make your own Word of the Day Flashcards
Word of the Day apps are convenient, but sometimes you have your own list of words you want to study. Fortunately, there are online programs that let you make and save your own flashcards. Here's one called Cram. You can do it online, and you can download the app to use on your smart phone.
00101 Japanese - English Composition - Not a bad set of flashcards, but Italian is spelled with an 'l' not an 'r'. Another flashcard app is called Anki.; also Wokabulary |
Corpus - The most frequently used words in English
What if you don't have a list of words in mind? Why not start with the most frequently used words in English? You can start with the easier words that are used often and work your way up to more and more difficult words, which are words you will hear only once in a while, or words that are used in very specific situations. The site below, Word Frequency Data, lists English words in order of frequency. You can also see (on the right) lists of the most frequent verbs and nouns. The words in the list are the top 5,000 words in contemporary American English.
Phrases or Collocations
If you would rather study phrases or collocations, which are words that frequently appear together, there are lists of those as well. Click on the image below or at right for a nice list of phrases in order of frequency with an example of each. The image here shows only the top 10, but there are hundreds. |