How do I practice names and technical words for work?

By looking the specific word up directly rather than hoping it shows up in a general drill set — most of what actually costs you clarity at work is proper nouns, brand names, and field-specific jargon that no curated vocabulary list was ever going to include.

30-second version: General pronunciation practice, minimal pairs, and curated word lists are built around the highest-frequency vocabulary in the language, which is exactly right for building a foundation and exactly wrong for the one word you actually need this week — a colleague's name, a drug name, a legal term, a competitor's product. Any real word can be looked up individually, scored the same way as any common word, and drilled until it's reliable, without waiting for it to appear in someone else's curriculum.

Why this category of word is different

Common-vocabulary drills exist because frequency is a reasonable proxy for value — practicing the 500 most common English words helps almost everyone, almost immediately. But that logic breaks down completely for your actual daily friction points. If you work in software, the words costing you clarity in meetings are things like framework names, acronyms said as words, and colleagues' names — none of which show up on a general frequency list, and none of which a generic course has any reason to include. The same is true across fields: a nurse needs medication names, a lawyer needs Latin terms, a teacher needs students' names correctly on the first try.

These words also tend to be higher-stakes in a specific way: mispronouncing a common word rarely damages credibility much, because listeners are used to accented common vocabulary. Mispronouncing a colleague's name repeatedly, or a client's company name, reads very differently — it's noticed, and it's remembered, in a way a merged vowel in "very" usually isn't.

How to check any word, not just the covered ones

Every word gets the same underlying analysis regardless of whether it's common or obscure — the target IPA is generated from the word itself, not pulled from a fixed list of pre-approved vocabulary. That means you can look up and drill a name, a medical term, or a technical acronym exactly the way you'd drill "think" or "very": see the target sounds, record yourself, and get the same per-phoneme breakdown. Any real word works this way at /pronounce/{word} — type the word you actually need, not the word a course happened to include.

What the practice looks like

For a name or technical term you'll use repeatedly, the most efficient approach is a short, dedicated session on that one word: look up the target IPA, listen if audio is available, record your own attempt, and check which specific sound (if any) is being flagged. Because it's one word rather than a whole passage, you can iterate quickly — five or six attempts in the time a full sentence drill would take for one.

For names specifically, a useful extra step: build the name from its parts if it has recognizable pieces (a name like "Siobhan" or "Xiomara" is far less mysterious once you know the individual sound sequence than when you're only guessing from the spelling), and if you'll be using it often, drill it in a sentence, not just alone — "This is [name], our new project lead" tests it under the same conditions you'll actually use it.

Drill it

There's no universal drill sentence here, deliberately — the whole point is that the word you need is specific to you. Take the actual name or term causing you trouble this week, look it up, and record it in a sentence you'd realistically say at work.

How do I know it's improving?

Track the specific word across a few real uses, not a fixed drill schedule — the test that actually matters is whether you say it confidently and correctly the next time it comes up in conversation, not whether a rehearsed recording scores well. If you keep needing to check the same word repeatedly, that's a sign to build it into a short recurring practice rather than a one-off lookup.

Try it

Look up any word you actually need — a name, an acronym said aloud, a technical term — and then record it in a sentence, free, no install, no card. The word that matters most to your week is rarely the one in someone else's textbook.