What are the words you should have a total mastery of?

This book gives you 11 lists of English words. These lists give you a total of 7373 words. If you’re trying to achieve a high degree of fluency in English, and if one of your fluency-blocking problems is that the right word (or another word or expression that you can use in its place) doesn’t often occur to you readily, these are the words you should master.

They’re the words you’ll find necessary, as well as normally sufficient, to maintain a high level of fluency, when you’re communicating with anyone in English — no matter what the topic. So I’ve called these words fluency words. You need these words, whether you’re speaking or writing in English, or listening to or reading the English spoken or written by someone.

When two or more people are using a language to communicate, there are two aspects to what is going on:

• “Production” of the language used by one or more of them — that is, the process of speaking or writing.

• “Reception” of the speech or writing so produced — that is, the process of hearing/listening or reading.

The 7373 words given in this book are necessary, and normally sufficient, for the production as well as the reception processes.

These 7373 words are the most frequently-occurring words both in speech and writing — irrespective of the topic. And these are the words of the greatest general utility, too. Here are three reasons:

First of all, they’re the words that most of your hearers and readers are likely to know and understand. And so, they’re the words you should use almost exclusively while speaking or writing — because they’re the words that are most likely to help your hearers and readers to understand you.

Second, they’re also the words everyone who speaks or writes English uses most heavily and most frequently. And so they’re the words that’d help you understand them.

Third, they’re the words that can help you more than any other words to mentally compose what you want to say or write — and to say it or write it at the same time as you compose it, with the greatest ease. This is because these words have an interesting feature: They all (especially, the most frequent 3000 of them) have a strong tendency to form syntactic as well as lexical patterns with many others among them, and these patterns help you to produce speech and writing chunk by chunk, with each chunk containing a group of closely connected words, rather than word by word.

The first four lists cover 2788 words. These are the most frequently-occurring 2788 words in the English language — in spoken as well as written English. If you achieve a total mastery of these 2788 words, they can take care of almost 80% of all your vocabulary needs — whether you’re speaking or writing, and whatever the topic. The rest of the 20% of your vocabulary needs would normally be met mostly by vocabulary items made up of the words in the remaining seven lists, and to some extent by the specialist vocabulary items particular to the topic you’re speaking or writing about.

I’ve categorized the 2788 words covered by the first four lists as the ‘Maximum General Utility’ words (MGU words). I’ve divided these words again into three sub-groups — according to their frequency and general importance: Group AAA, Group AA and Group A.

Group AAA contains the most important 707 of the MGU words, Group AA contains 918 words that come next in importance, and Group A contains the remaining 1163 MGU words. For your convenience, I’ve also added a master list containing all MGU words (AAA, AA and A) mixed together and arranged alphabetically.

The next four lists cover 2386 words that come next in frequency and general importance. These words also occur very frequently, though not as frequently as the MGU words. These words can add to your fluency level in two types of situations:

(i) when you’re trying to add serious content to what you’re saying or writing.

(ii) when you’re speaking or writing about topics outside everyday conversational subjects.

I’ve categorized these words as ‘Near-Maximum Utility’ words (NMU words). I’ve divided these words again into three sub-groups: Group BBB, Group BB and Group B.

Group BBB contains the most important 951 NMU words, Group BB contains 1015 words that come next in importance, and Group B contains the remaining 420 NMU words. For your convenience, I’ve also added a master list containing all NMU words (BBB, BB and B) mixed together and arranged alphabetically.

Then there are three more lists of words. These three lists cover 2199 words. These 2199 words are not as frequent as the MGU words or as the NMU words in everyday speech or writing, but are quite frequent in serious discussions and writing — especially, in writing.

You’ll find these words extremely useful when you’re trying to speak or write about a topic by dealing with it very thoroughly and by considering all the important aspects of it carefully and in a detailed way. These words would help you to pack meaning and content into what you say or write, and to present your facts, ideas, thoughts and arguments cogently and clearly — and still remain fluent.

I’ve categorized these words as ‘Advanced General Utility’ words (AGU words). I’ve divided these words again into two sub-groups: Group CC and Group C.

Group CC contains 1149 AGU words that are more frequent than the words in Group C. As for Group C, it contains 1050 AGU words. For your convenience, I’ve also added a master list containing all AGU words (CC and C) mixed together and arranged alphabetically.

Note that I’ve divided the AGU words only into two groups (CC and C), and not into three. I’ve not categorized any of these words into a ‘CCC’ group, because I want to signal one thing to you by the very way I’ve categorized these words: The AGU are considerably less frequent and of considerably less general utility than the MGU words and the NMU words.

There’s an important thing you should note about what you get in this book. This book lists only words — and not all the possible types of vocabulary items. What is the difference? You see, vocabulary items consist not only of individual words, but also of multi-word units — phrasal verbs, collocations, fixed and semi-fixed phrases, compound words, idioms, etc. This book does not include multi-word units, except for a few that occur so commonly (as ‘wholes’) as to amount to single words.

But remember that even multi-word units are made up of individual words. They’re nothing but combinations of individual words. And so what this book covers is a collection of the most fundamental items of English vocabulary. But don’t forget one thing: Individual words really begin to help you by meeting your vocabulary needs only when you’ve learnt what words often occur before and after them, and only when you’ve learnt to use these co-occurring words as cluster-wholes. Mind you, generally speaking, it’s one thing to know individual words, and quite another to know these multi-word clusters. You have to learn these multi-word clusters separately — by concentrating your attention on them separately.

There are so many words in the English language that nobody can say precisely how many there are. And the overall size of the English vocabulary keeps growing day by day with the addition of newly-coined words.

All estimates of the total vocabulary size are inexact, and they vary from each other very widely. These estimates range from around 400,000 words to around 800,000 words.

But most of these 400,000 to 800,000 words are highly technical and scientific words. And most of the words that get newly coined every day are technical and scientific words, too. As for the words other than the highly technical and scientific ones, a considerable percentage of them is made up of archaic words and obsolete words — and so are not of any use in normal spoken or written communication.

What is left is only around 200,000 words, and this is the vocabulary field that supplies words for common use.

Now take a very well-read university graduate whose mother-tongue is English. How many words do you think such a person can be said to know out of these 200,000 or so words?

Estimates show that such a person may know about 15 to 20 thousand word families. Remember: Word families — not words. Each word family consists of several words. Considering this fact, it’s estimated that such a person may know around 100,000 English words.

But the degree of their knowledge (of these words) varies from word to word. As far as the most frequent 7000 or so words are concerned, they can be said to know these words thoroughly. But as far as most of the low-frequency words (words outside these frequently-used words) are concerned, their knowledge of these words can only be said to be recognition knowledge. That is, they can be said to know most of these words only to the extent that they can recognize them (and understand them in a general way) in other people’s speech or writing.

I said just now that words for common use come from a vocabulary size of around 200,000 words. This doesn’t mean that all these 200,000 words are commonly used ones. No. In fact, out of these 200,000 or so words, only around 40,000 to 60,000 words are of general utility — even for well-read native speakers of English. The remaining words are mostly for use only by subject experts during learned discussions and in learned writings about the deeper aspects of various concepts in specialized subject fields.

Again, don’t be under the impression that every one of these 40,000 to 60,000 words is quite frequent. That is not so. Actually, only a small percentage of them (MGU, NMU and AGU words) can be said to be frequent, and a far smaller percentage (MGU words) to be highly frequent. The remaining words among these 40,000 to 60,000 are low-frequency words.

The 40,000 to 60,000 words of general utility are the words that a typical dictionary for advanced learners normally covers.

Now, is it possible to divide the 40,000 or so words of general utility into the following two broad categories?

• Productive words
• Receptive words

By “Productive words”, I mean words that are needed to produce English — that is, to speak or write English, rather than to receive it. And by “Receptive words”, I mean words that are needed to receive English — that is, to listen to and to understand English, or to read and to understand English.

Strictly speaking, such a neat division is not possible. Actually, there are no words that belong only to the productive mode or to the receptive mode, because any word that is a productive word for the producer is a receptive word for the receiver, and any word that’s a receptive word for the receiver is a productive word for the producer.

Altogether, this book covers 7373 words. Broadly speaking, all these are productive words of frequent utility, and so, for the same reason, are also receptive words of frequent utility. In other words, they’re productive-cum-receptive words of frequent utility. That’s why you need to master these words for a high degree of fluency in English.

Now how about the remaining words of general utility (that is, words outside these 7373 words, but within the list of 40,000 to 60,000 words of general utility)? We’ll call them receptive words rather than productive-cum-receptive words — because they’re far less frequent than the 7373 words that people in general actually use. Of course, a small percentage of people, especially, academics and subject experts, tend to use many of them somewhat frequently while speaking or writing about their special fields of interest. But speakers and writers in general do not normally use those words — except to meet an occasional need. As far as speakers and writers in general are concerned, they normally come across these words only in reading or while listening to academics, subject experts and people steeped in written English — that too, in situations that are limited.

So for people in general, the words outside the 7373 words covered in this book are receptive words, rather than productive words — for all practical purposes.

The words you find in this book are important for getting along well both in the spoken mode and in the written mode of English — and not in the spoken mode alone or in the written mode alone. But we can say that, for spoken English fluency, the first 2788 words (MGU words) are far more important than any other words. In general, the remaining words are more frequent in the written mode than in the spoken mode. In fact, all the MGU words (2788) can be said to be of equal importance in spoken English and written English — though the degree of frequency may vary from word to word. That is, you need to have a total mastery of all these 2788 MGU words in order to speak English fluently and to write English fluently. The 951 NMU words belonging to the BBB category are also almost as important in spoken English as in written English.

The remaining 3634 words belong to the BB and B categories and the CC and C categories. As far as these words are concerned, they’re more frequent in written English than in spoken English.

So if you’re trying to achieve a good command of spoken English, the words you should master are the 2788 MGU words. And if you’re a person who needs to make heavy use of spoken English in a wide range of situations, you should try and master the 951 BBB words also.

Of course, if you’re trying to achieve a good command of written English (and not just of spoken English alone), you must not limit yourself to the MGU words and the first 951 of the NMU words. You must go ahead and master all the MGU words and all the NMU words.

As far as the remaining 2199 words (that is, the AGU words) are concerned, you don’t need as complete a mastery over them as over the MGU words or over the NMU words — unless your career or profession demands you to take part in serious discussions about weighty matters or to write content-heavy reports and other stuff frequently.

Remember this: We’re speaking about mastery of words, that is, about learning them so thoroughly that you’ll be able to use them to produce speech and writing easily. And we’re not speaking about acquiring just a small amount of knowledge about them, an amount of knowledge that is enough only to make them part of your receptive or recognition vocabulary.

About words outside the 7373 words given in this book, let me tell you two things:

First, though you need not spend time mastering the words outside the 7373 fluency words (but within the list of 40,000 – 60,000 words of general utility), you should not ignore them totally. You should gradually get acquainted with them – especially, those falling within the first 7000 to 8000 among them – so that they form part of your recognition vocabulary. In fact, you’ll even come to find some of them to be of occasional productive use. But don’t spend any time trying to gain as much mastery over them as over the 7373 fluency words — unless there’s a particular reason. That would be a waste of effort.

Second, people who are into specialist careers and who need to speak or write a lot about their specialized subject fields will often find it necessary to use a certain amount of lower-frequency vocabulary (outside the 7373 fluency words) quite frequently while speaking or writing about their field of study. For them, it’d be a good idea to identify these items of lower-frequency vocabulary and to spend time mastering them.