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.
