Which Words Should You Look Up When Reading in English?

Here is a count of the words in the Project Gutenberg text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story runs to about 27,000 words, made up of about 2,600 different word forms. Around 1,100 of those forms, more than four in ten, appear only once in the whole book. Yet all of those once-only words together make up only about 4% of the text. The roughly 700 forms that appear five times or more make up 88% of it.

The count is simple. Forms like run and ran are counted as different words. Even so, the numbers say something useful. In a single book, a small number of words repeat, and those few words make up most of what you read. Words that appear once are many in kind, but small in amount.

I wrote about the bigger question, whether to use a dictionary at all, in How to Do Extensive Reading in English: Dictionaries, Difficulty and How Much to Read. This post is about the next step: once you have decided to look words up, which ones.

Look it up the second time it appears

One rule is to look a word up the second or third time you meet it.

Skip it the first time. It may be one of those once-only words. If it comes back, the chance that it matters to this book goes up. By the third time, it almost certainly does. In Alice, curious appears 19 times and hastily 16 times. Look a word like that up once, and you understand the other dozen or more times you meet it.

The difficulty is noticing that a word has come back. At first, it helps to make a small pencil mark each time you meet an unknown word, so you recognise it the second time.

Look it up at once if you lose the plot

The exception is a word without which you can’t follow the story. If it sits at the centre of who did what, or what happened, it is worth looking up the first time.

To tell which words those are, look at the job the word does in the sentence. Verbs, and nouns that are the subject or object, are usually at the centre. Adjectives and adverbs describe how things are, and you can often follow the story without them. If you don’t know hastily in “She left the room hastily”, you still know she left the room.

But if that adverb keeps coming back, the first rule applies. Hastily in Alice is a case in point.

Words you can skip

There are also words you can leave alone.

Names of people, places and imaginary creatures. If a word starts with a capital letter in the middle of a sentence, it is usually a name. In Alice, it is enough to know from the story what the Gryphon and the Dormouse are.

One-off specialist words. Names of plants, tools or dishes sometimes appear once in a description. If you can tell it is some kind of plant, you can move on.

Old forms and dialect. Some writers spell dialogue the way a character speaks. These spellings are often not in dictionaries, and reading them aloud may show you an ordinary word underneath.

How many lookups a page

There is no fixed answer to how many words to look up on a page. One reference point is two or three per page. If page after page makes you want more than that, the book is hard for you right now, and you are doing intensive study rather than extensive reading. That is not wrong, but it can be a signal to decide again how you are reading this book.

Before you look a word up, you can also guess its meaning first. Guessing, then checking whether you were right, stays with you better than looking up alone. I wrote more about that in Build Your English Vocabulary Notebook from Your Own Reading.

Look up phrases as a whole

Sometimes you know every word and still don’t understand the sentence. Phrasal verbs and idioms like give up or put up with are the usual cause. Here it is faster to look up the whole phrase than each word. In a paper dictionary, phrases are usually listed near the end of the entry for their main word.

Choosing what to look up in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that lets you read whole English books from Project Gutenberg. Long-press a word and tap Look up, and the built-in dictionary shows a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses.

Words you look up are saved to your Word Book automatically, with the sentence you met them in. When you look up the same word again, the dictionary sheet shows something like “In your word book · looked up 2 times”. If you see that, the word is one that keeps coming up in this book. Sorting the Word Book by Most looked up puts those words at the top.

Some words you only want to check, not keep. Turn off Save every lookup in Settings, and lookups are no longer saved. You can still keep a single word with the save button on the dictionary sheet. The same switch is in the reader’s settings sheet, so you can change it while reading.

The built-in dictionary has no entries for phrases. If you select two or more words and tap Look up, a sheet asks which word to look up. For the meaning of a phrasal verb or idiom, keep the phrase selected and tap Cambridge in the selection menu, and the Cambridge Dictionary search opens inside the app.

There are no ads and no account, and books read offline once downloaded. Only Cambridge and Translate, which open web pages, need a connection. Getting Started with ABC George walks through your first book.