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Meanings of unfamiliar words can often be guessed by using spelling, grammar or logic
RATIONALE FOR THIS TOPIC
Meeting unfamiliar words in listening and reading is normal at all levels of language competence, even in our mother tongue. Beginners in a language obviously struggle with large numbers of words, while at higher levels most people have gaps in their knowledge because reaching the ability to successfully communicate slows down further vocabulary acquisition. Trying to guess the meanings of unknown words is also normal – indeed, it is how we acquire most of the vocabulary of our mother tongue.
Most language teachers and coursebooks encourage word-guessing as a means of promoting vocabulary acquisition. They urge learners to read intensively and extensively, and they often supplement “comprehension” texts with vocabulary-study exercises involving guessing. Very rarely, however, is detailed advice given on exactly what needs to be done to guess word meanings successfully. My own experience as a language teacher suggests that at least some learners need this advice because the guessing is done with variable success.
The desirability of helping learners to guess word meanings has for me been confirmed by what becomes apparent when the word-guessing process is closely examined. It turns out to be multi-faceted. In this post I wish to show the truth of that. My ideas are not particularly informed by the mass of academic research in this area, but are mainly based on extensive experience trying to help students who are less familiar with English to hypothesise about word meanings. For more advice on improving language learning, see 202. Some Strategies for Learning English.
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PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
It is important first to appreciate that exact meanings of unfamiliar words are rarely able to be guessed – multiple encounters with the words are needed to enable a broad meaning picture to be built up (and to strengthen them in memory). Some meanings, indeed, cannot be guessed with any certainty at all. If one is lucky, one can ignore these without it greatly diminishing overall understanding of the text – otherwise help must be sought from a dictionary or elsewhere.
Also to be noted is the fact that some unfamiliar words in texts are actually accompanied by an explanation of their meaning, so that guessing is unnecessary. I have known language students who have not realised this and struggled as a result with the word! Consider these:
(a) The stomach walls secrete gastric juices, a combination of several enzymes and hydrochloric acid.
(b) Manuscripts would be mass produced in schools called scriptoriums
In (a), gastric juices is explained by the words after it. This is clear from the comma and immediate use of another noun expression – a common means of linking a word with its explanation (see 77. Apposition). Sometimes, there is helpful wording showing the relation between the two nouns, such as in other words. If the word or is used, however, there is a problem of double meanings (see 286. Repeating in Different Words, #4).
In (b), scriptoriums is shown by called to be the name of special schools for mass-producing manuscripts (see 206. Ways of Conveying a Name).
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WORD-GUESSING STRATEGIES
The main kinds of clue that might help word-guessing are spelling, grammar and logic.
1. Spelling Clues
In a few cases, the entirety of a new word may look familiar. One reason why this can happen without the word having previously been encountered in English is the existence of the spelling in another language. Another is the spelling having an alternative English meaning, whether related to the familiar one (see 7. Metaphorical Meanings) or completely different (see 11. Homonyms and Homographs).
Care is always needed with spellings also found in other languages because they so often mean something slightly different there. Ancient, for example, which means “very far in the past” in English, resembles spellings meaning “former” in most of Southern Europe. Safari, meaning “wildlife-viewing vacation” in English, is just a journey in Swahili (see also security in 236. Tricky Word Contrasts 9, #1). The name often given to such misleading words is “false friends”.
More often, a familiar spelling is a part of a new word. Not all words have such parts, and if they do the resemblance may just be a coincidence, without any meaning connection. However, a connection will often exist. Take the word respiratory. If you know that respire means “breathe”, then you can guess that this idea is involved. Knowing that -tory usually signals either a noun or adjective (see 172. Multi-Use Suffixes, #9), you may be able to work out which it is here by examining the sentence position of the word in the text. Respiratory is actually an adjective meaning “associated with breathing”.
A need for care with this approach may be illustrated by a mistake I once made in analysing the origins of the word helicopter. Using my knowledge of Ancient Greek, I reasoned that heli- referred to the sun, and -copter meant “beating”, “sun-beating” being a reasonable description of the action of helicopter blades. Later, I realised I should have recognised helico- as “revolving” and -pter as “wing” (see 90. The Greek Impact on English Vocabulary).
Meaningful word parts are divided by linguists into two kinds: roots and affixes. Roots are mostly spellings that also exist as individual words, while affixes only modify the meaning and/or grammatical category of a root. Respir- is thus a root, and -atory is an affix (of the “suffix” – word ending – variety). Some multi-part words mix a root with one or more affixes, while others (known as “compounds”) have two or more roots, with or without affixes, e.g. household and anywhere (see 26. One Word or Two?).
The total number of affixes is much more finite than that of roots, and many individual ones, such as in- and -ness, are found on large numbers of words. This makes it worth learning them for the purpose of recognising them in unfamiliar words. Posts within these pages that aim to assist this include 106. Word-Like Suffixes, 146. Some Important Prefix Types and 249. Action Noun Endings.
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2. Grammar Clues
Knowing the grammatical class (“part of speech”) of an unfamiliar word can greatly help its meaning to be guessed. One kind of clue is affixes, since many are found only in words of a single grammar class. For example, en- generally indicates a verb, -ness a noun (see 255. Nouns Made from Adjectives, #9), and -ive an adjective (see 304 Adjectives Made from a Verb, #2). A problem, though, is that many others show different word classes more or less equally: -ing and -s indicate nouns as well as verbs, -ly adjectives as well as adverbs, and un- verbs, nouns or adjectives.
A perhaps more reliable grammatical indicator of word class is particular surrounding words. Will, may, can etc. are likely to precede a verb, very usually signals an adjective or adverb, and after a preposition we expect to find a noun. Consider this:
(c) Greek philosophers were not bound in the fetters of orthodoxy.
It is clear here that fetters is a noun: the clues are the preceding preposition in and article the, and the subsequent -s and adjective-like of phrase (see 160. Uses of “of”).
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3. Logic Clues
Once the grammatical class of a word is recognised, logic becomes easier to use to discover more. In many cases, the basis of logical deduction is the meaning of the surrounding words. One very helpful kind of such words is lists, since their parts tend to be clearly similar in some way – indeed the similarity is sometimes even stated as a “list name” (see 55. Sentence Lists 2). The new word is then understood to possess this similarity too. For example, in a list of foods we will know that it must be a food. This is not a complete deduction of the meaning, but it is often enough.
Perhaps the commonest kind of clue from surrounding words comes when their meaning can be combined with our own general knowledge. Consider again fetters in (c) above. Its occurrence after bound in suggests that it means something used for binding or restraining people. General knowledge can then indicate that binding normally involves hands or feet, leading to the conclusion that fetters somehow restrain those parts of the body. The similarity of the word to feet, indeed, strongly suggests those parts in particular (though my dictionary makes no such link).
To take another example:
(d) Food travels from the mouth to the stomach via the oesophagus.
It is immediately clear here that the oesophagus is a food-carrier. If we are generally familiar with the human body, we will readily understand a tube-like structure. Yet even without this familiarity, logic will indicate such a shape. For a further example of this kind of deduction, see 197. The Language of Bibliographies, example sentence (a).
Another kind of contextual clue is a synonym used nearby not deliberately to explain the word’s meaning but to avoid sounding repetitious – a very common writing practice (see 5. Repetition-Reducing Synonyms). In the following, such a clue can assist understanding of vexed:
(e) The problem of God knowing our future has vexed philosophers since at least the third century. In related forms it has bothered philosophers longer than that.
Vexed corresponds here, of course, to bothered. The only problem with this kind of clue is that the reader has to recognise the relatedness of the two words in the first place! The parallel structures of the two above sentences are a help. In the next example, help in understanding scapegoat comes from the fact that it is part of a typical structure for repeating something from the preceding sentence, namely a starting preposition phrase (see 37. Subordination):
(f) Worsening poverty and hunger, loss of agricultural land, migration, shanty towns, pollution, even war have all been blamed on the “population explosion”. AS a general SCAPEGOAT for the world’s troubles, it allows difficult policy questions to be avoided.
The word in the first sentence that corresponds to scapegoat is blamed – a verb instead of noun, but that makes no difference. A scapegoat is actually an object of unjustified blame, but recognising the idea of blame is a good start – later sentences might clarify it further.
Finally, it is sometimes oppositeness of two words rather than equivalence that helps guessing. Consider this:
(g) The defining mark of a species is that its members can breed with other members to produce offspring of the same species. Unions between members of different species, on the other hand, are often sterile.
The indicator of oppositeness here is the connector on the other hand (see 20. Problem Connectors, # 1). It helps the meaning of sterile to be recognised as the opposite of produce offspring: “unable to reproduce”.
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