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Word list

Difficult words to pronounce

Words that trip up fluent speakers too: consonant pile-ups, stress that lands where the spelling does not suggest, and vowels that reduce to almost nothing. 155 words, each one checked: American and British IPA, the stress marked, and the slips people actually make.
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The list

Every word, with its transcription

Other lists

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Word lists

Academic Word List

561 words — All 570 headwords of Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL, Victoria University of Wellington, 2000) — the vocabulary that appears across every academic discipline. Long words with moving stress, so they are worth drilling out loud.

GRE vocabulary

328 words — High-frequency GRE words. Many are Latinate with four or more syllables, so the stress pattern matters as much as the definition.

IELTS Speaking vocabulary

289 words — Topic vocabulary across the IELTS Speaking Part 1, 2 and 3 themes — work, study, home, travel, technology, environment, health, culture and society. Pronunciation is a quarter of your Speaking band.

SAT vocabulary

263 words — Words that recur in SAT reading and writing passages. Reading them aloud is the fastest way to stop confusing pairs that look alike on the page.

Commonly mispronounced words

196 words — The words English learners — and plenty of native speakers — get wrong, with the sound people expect to hear and the one that is actually there.

Words with silent letters

172 words — Letters English writes but does not say — the b in debt, the k in knee, the s in island, the t in castle. Say the letter and the word stops sounding English.

TOEFL Speaking vocabulary

158 words — Vocabulary for the TOEFL iBT independent and integrated Speaking tasks — campus life, lectures, research and opinion language, under a 45-second clock.

Business English

152 words — The vocabulary of meetings, email, strategy and negotiation. Say these cleanly and you sound like someone who does the job, not someone describing it.

GMAT vocabulary

150 words — Words that recur in GMAT verbal reasoning and business-school reading. Practise them aloud so the meaning sticks through sound as well as sight.

TOEIC vocabulary

149 words — Workplace vocabulary that the TOEIC tests: scheduling, shipping, invoicing, personnel, travel and customer contact.

Advanced English vocabulary

147 words — C1–C2 words that mark fluent, precise English. Most are three or four syllables with an unstressed vowel that collapses to a schwa — the single biggest reason an advanced word sounds laboured.

PTE Academic vocabulary

138 words — Vocabulary for PTE Academic Read Aloud, Repeat Sentence and Describe Image. PTE scores pronunciation and oral fluency by machine, so clean vowels and consonants count twice.

Job interview vocabulary

119 words — The words you actually say when you describe your experience, your strengths and what you want next. Say them confidently and clearly, because the first minute sets the tone.

English for students

103 words — Classroom, campus and coursework vocabulary: the words you need to ask a question, give a presentation and write about what you read.

English for professionals

101 words — Words that come up in client calls, standups, reviews and presentations across engineering, medicine, law, finance and consulting.

Or browse every published word A–Z.

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