Word of the Week

wowWith its 120th word, Word of the Week has now come to an end. We hope you enjoyed this free feature and that it has given you an insight into the thinking and research behind the English Vocabulary Profile.

All 120 are still available to read in our archive, below. Each Word of the Week in the archive is followed by a link to the full entry for that word on the English Vocabulary Profile. To view the entries, you will need to subscribe to the EVP: to subscribe for free click here.

Word of the week: win

The word win is a verb and a noun, but you will only find the verb in the A and B levels of the English Vocabulary Profile – the noun winner is included at A2. The four meanings of the verb in the entry for win include ELECTION at B1. This meaning has been tagged with the newly-added topic label Politics. Using Advanced Search in the drop-down menu, it is possible to search for words and phrases that are connected to one of 22 topics, even filtering the search results to produce a single part of speech, or words and phrases of a certain register.
 
To view the full entry for win on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.

Word of the week: take

The entry for the verb take is one of the longest in the English Vocabulary Profile – there are 67 core results listed for the first four CEFR levels alone! This is due to the many phrases and phrasal verbs that are included. The noun take is far less common, though may be included at the C levels in the sense of your take on sth, which is increasingly being used by first language speakers, especially in the media. What’s your own take on this? Learners sometimes find colloquial expressions hard to grasp and there is rarely much evidence for them in the Cambridge Learner Corpus, which only contains written learner language. Please comment via the feedback button on the usefulness of teaching this use of the noun take – do your own students know it? There is some corpus evidence for the frequent idiom give and take, so this will be included at the C levels.
 
To view the full entry for take on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.

Word of the week: same

The entry for the word same covers three parts of speech: adjective, pronoun and adverb. Learners appear to meet the adjective first, and two meanings are given at A1. The B1 prepositional phrase at the same time is included in this part of the entry and you will also find the phrase in the entries for at and time, which have both been featured in Word of the Week - visit the archive to view these entries. As for the pronoun part of speech, there are three distinct uses of the phrase the same, given A2, B1 and B2 according to learner evidence and the many other sources that have been checked, such as coursebook wordlists.
 
To view the full entry for same on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.

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