A university education is all about learning new words; specifically the precise meaning of conceptual vocabulary. A good writer, however, ought to be able to choose what the French novelist Gustave Flaubert liked to call “le mot juste“; that is, precisely the “right” word to create precisely the right effect in a reader’s mind. These resources will help you begin to expand your academic and writerly vocabulary.
The Academic Word List (AWL) – You should already know this!
- All 570 AWL “headwords” and their “word families” (3,000 words total)(uefap.com)
- AWL sublists from 1 (most frequently used) to 10 (least frequent)(eapfoundation.com)
- AWL Gap-maker / highlighter (eapfoundation.com)
- Vocab profiler – see the first 1000, second 1000, AWL, and off list words in a text (lextutor.ca)
Dictionaries and Thesauri
- Merriam Webster’s collegiate dictionary and thesaurus (of American English – standard at Bilkent)
- Thesaurus.com (a synonyms dictionary – great for finding those “right words”)
Collocations Research
- collocations dictionary (learn how to use words in context)
- wordandphrase.info (concordancer, thesaurus, formality analysis)