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Word list

Commonly mispronounced 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. 206 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

More ways to work through the dictionary

Word lists

Everyday English words

1176 words — The most frequent words in English, with their pronunciation, syllables and stress.

Academic Word List

570 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

353 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

295 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

264 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.

Words with silent letters

178 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.

Difficult words to pronounce

161 words — 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.

TOEFL Speaking vocabulary

159 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

158 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.

Advanced English vocabulary

154 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.

TOEIC vocabulary

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

GMAT vocabulary

152 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.

PTE Academic vocabulary

139 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

126 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 professionals

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

English for students

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

Words with two pronunciations

91 words — Heteronyms: one spelling, two ways to say it, and the part of speech decides which. The stress moves in PREZ-ent and pri-ZENT, the vowel changes in wind and wind, and a single wrong beat turns a noun into a verb mid-sentence. Every page here shows both forms side by side.

Or browse every published word A–Z.

Practise this word

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