With its 120th word, Word of the Week has now come to an end. We hope you enjoyed this free feature and that it has given you an insight into the thinking and research behind the English Vocabulary Profile.
All 120 are still available to read in our archive, below. Each Word of the Week in the archive is followed by a link to the full entry for that word on the English Vocabulary Profile. To view the entries, you will need to subscribe to the EVP: to subscribe for free click here.
Word of the week: number
The word number is a noun and a verb. Only the noun is included in the A and B levels of the English Vocabulary Profile – the verb is far less frequent and will feature in the C levels. As reported in previous Word of the Week entries, validation work has drawn on research into phrasal expressions (Martínez, 2010), and number proved to be an interesting case. In the original data, the B1 meaning AMOUNT included the phrase a number of but Ron Martínez rightly pointed out that the meaning of this phrase is different – it means ‘several’. We therefore looked at the phrase again, and decided to place it at B2, as the entry shows. This is just one of a number of instances where the project has benefited from expert validation.To view the full entry for number on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.
Word of the week: more
The word more is a determiner, pronoun and adverb. Learners meet it at a very early stage but, as the entry shows, their knowledge of this word extends into the B levels, with the phrases once more, more and more and more or less. What’s more is also picked out as a phrase at B2 level and appears in the core results for more. Thanks to the electronic nature of the English Vocabulary Profile, there is a great deal of useful information just a mouse click away. Happy browsing!To view the full entry for more on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.
Word of the week: immediate
The adjective immediate first appears at B2 in the English Vocabulary Profile. Learners know the more frequent adverb immediately at A2, but the two meanings for immediate given in the entry below, WITHOUT WAITING and IMPORTANT NOW, are at a higher level of competence. One further meaning of the adjective will be added at C1 level, that of CLOSEST, as in the dictionary examples There are few facilities in the immediate area and His immediate family have been informed. Roland Hindmarsh, who produced the landmark Cambridge English Lexicon more than thirty years ago, put this meaning at his level 6, which corresponds to C1. Hindmarsh’s work has been a useful additional source for this project and, where the language hasn’t changed, it remains an impressively accurate ‘graded word list’, which was painstakingly prepared without the benefits of 21st century computer technology.To view the full entry for immediate on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.
Word of the week: hand
The word hand is a noun and a verb, and also features in several phrasal verbs. Three of these are included up to B2 level: hand in, hand out and hand over. At the C levels, the phrasal verb hand down will be added. As with previous entries for parts of the body, the noun appears in several idioms at C2, including get/gain the upper hand, get out of hand and have your hands full. The phrase hand in hand is included in the entry below at B2 with the literal meaning of holding hands, whereas the idiom go hand in hand will appear at C1. This is a common idiom, with substantial evidence of learner use in the Cambridge Learner Corpus – our policy in the English Vocabulary Profile is to restrict inclusion to frequent idioms for which there is also some learner evidence.To view the full entry for hand on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.
Word of the week: give
Last week’s Word of the Week featured the verb take and now it’s the turn of another very frequent verb in English, give. The entry below spans the first four CEFR levels and the phrases give way and give rise to sth will be added at the C levels. Learners meet the basic meaning of the verb PROVIDE at A1 level, which is likely to be commonly used in the language classroom, as in Can you give me your homework? Some of the A2 meanings may already be known at A1 but the evidence is not there at the moment – as the entry shows, three of these meanings actually have B1 Learner examples rather than examples at A2. We are currently building the Cambridge English Profile Corpus, a new corpus of learner English, to encompass non-exam writing and spoken data, which will inform subsequent iterations of the English Vocabulary Profile. If you and your students are able to take part in our data collection project, you will gain free access to the EVP resource. The English Profile website has more details – follow this link to the page on Data Collection.To view the full entry for give on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.
