Page 15 - English Vocabulary in Use (Pre & Intermediate)

English language words

Parts of speech
nouns e.g. chair, information, happiness
verbs e.g. choose, tell, complain
adjectives e.g. happy, tall, dangerous
adverbs e.g. slowly, carefully, often
prepositions e.g. in, at, on
pronouns e.g. me, you, him, we, it, she
articles e.g. definite article (the); indefinite article (a/an)
Special terms

Uncountable noun: (U) a noun which has no plural form and cannot be used with the
indefinite article, e.g. information. See Unit 27.
Plural noun: (p/) a noun which only has a plural form and cannot be used with the
indefinite article, e.g. trousers. See Unit 27.
Infinitive: the base form of a verb, e.g. (to) work, (to) stop, (to) be.
Phrasal verb: a verb + adverb and/or preposition, e.g. turn on (verb + adverb), look after
(verb + preposition), give up (verb + adverb), put up with (verb + adverb + preposition).
See Units 16 and 17.
Idiom: a group of words with a meaning that is different from the individual words, e.g.
never mind, hang on, a short cut, keep an eye on something.
Transitive verb: a verb which needs a direct object, e.g. Police caught the man (‘the man’ is
the direct object of the verb ‘caught’). See Unit 17.
Intransitive verb: a verb which does not need a direct object, e.g. The books arrived on
time. (There is no direct object after arrive.) See Unit 17.

Word building
In the word uncomfortable, un- is a prefix, comfort is a root, and -able is a suffix. Other
common prefixes include: re-, in-, and dis-; common suffixes include: -ity, -ment, and -ive.
Many words also have synonyms, which are words with the same meaning. For example,
‘big’ is a synonym of ‘large’. The opposite is ‘small’.

Pronunciation
Dictionaries show the pronunciation of a word using phonetic symbols, e.g. book /buk/,
before /bt'fa:/, cinema /'stnama/, and so on.
Each word contains one or more syllables: ‘book’ has one syllable; ‘before’ has two syllables
(be-fore); ‘cinema’ has three syllables (ci-ne-ma); ‘education’ has four syllables (e-du-ca-
tion); and so on.
For pronunciation, it is important to know which syllable has the main stress. On ‘before’ it
is the second syllable (before); on ‘cinema’ it is the first (cinema); and on ‘education’ it is the
third (education).
Note: Dictionaries mark stress in different ways: in bold (return); or a ' before the main
syllable (re‘turn). Make sure you understand how your dictionary shows it.

Punctuation
full stop. comma , brackets {) hyphen - question mark ?

English Vocabulary in Use (pre-intermediate & intermediate)