Saying names, brands and technical terms in your own field

30-second version: No curated word list will ever cover a coworker's name, your company's product names, or the specific technical jargon of your field — that vocabulary is unique to you, which means generic practice never touches it. The fix is building your own list: paste your actual field-specific text into custom passage practice and drill the words you'll say constantly, not the words a general list assumed you'd need.

Curated vocabulary lists — business English, academic vocabulary, professional English — are useful precisely because they're general. That generality is also their limit: no list, however well built, contains your specific coworker's name, your company's product line, the acronym-heavy jargon of your particular field, or the technical terms that show up in your meetings every single week. That vocabulary is yours alone, and it's exactly the vocabulary you'll say most often and most publicly — introducing a colleague, naming a product in a client call, explaining a technical concept.

Why this category gets neglected

It's invisible in the way that matters for practice: you already "know" these words in the sense that you recognize and understand them perfectly. The gap only shows up the moment you have to say one under a bit of pressure — introducing someone whose name has a sound your first language doesn't use, or naming a tool whose branding takes a genuinely unexpected pronunciation. Nothing prompts you to practice these in advance, because nothing about "knowing" them silently reveals the gap.

Categories worth building your own list around

• Coworker and client names. Ask, once, and get it right — then actually practise saying it a few times if the sounds are unfamiliar to you, rather than relying on a single correction to stick.
• Product and brand names, especially ones with non-standard or stylized pronunciation that doesn't follow ordinary spelling rules.
• Field-specific jargon and acronyms — said as words, spelled out letter by letter, or some mix, and that convention itself varies by field and needs to be learned, not guessed.
• Technical terms borrowed from other languages or with irregular English stress — common in scientific, medical, legal and engineering vocabulary specifically.

How to build and drill this list

1. 1.Paste your own material into custom practice. Custom passage practice accepts any text you paste in — drop in a real email, a meeting agenda, a product spec, anything containing the actual names and terms you need. This is the single most direct fix: practising the real vocabulary of your job, not a generic substitute for it.
2. 2.Look up the ones with unclear pronunciation. Any word — including field-specific ones the dictionary layer recognizes — can be checked for IPA and a hear-it audio via word lookup, even if it never appears on a curated list.
3. 3.Say it, record it, check it. The same scoring that catches a mispronounced common word catches a mispronounced product name or technical term — there's nothing special-cased about "your own" vocabulary once it's in a passage.
4. 4.Build a personal deck. Flashcards accept any word or phrase you add manually, IPA and definition optional — this is where your unique, field-specific vocabulary belongs, since no auto-generated deck will ever include it on its own.

The stakes are higher than for generic vocabulary

Mispronouncing a rare word from a GRE list costs you nothing socially — almost nobody would notice or judge it. Mispronouncing a colleague's name repeatedly, or a client's product name in a pitch, reads very differently. This category of vocabulary carries more social weight per word than almost any generic list does, which is the strongest case for giving it deliberate, individual attention rather than assuming it'll sort itself out.

Try it: paste a real email or meeting note from your own work into custom passage practice and read it aloud, flagging every name or term you'd rather double-check.