Using context clues to figure out new words | Reading | Khan Academy

Hello readers! You know that feeling when you're reading and you see a word you've never seen before and you don't really know how to figure out what it means? Well, that's what we're talking about today: strategies for figuring out new words through context.

You're always going to be encountering new words. At the time of this recording, I'm 31, and I run into new and confusing words every day. I read a lot, and it's always a fun challenge to run into words like, I don't know, glabrous or limbed or nacreous. I know a lot about language, and even I have trouble figuring out what those words mean on their own. So, it's important to rely on context—the language that surrounds the word.

Let's say you're reading a text and you come across a sentence that has a word in it you don't recognize. Here's a bit from a passage about the famous chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall: "Jane Goodall arrived at Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park in 1960. She was considered somewhat unconventional among other animal researchers. After all, she had not yet been to college."

So, let's pause on "unconventional." What does that word mean? Well, let me give you some ideas. That's the memory aid I use to keep it straight: Ideas. It stands for Inference, Definition, Example, Antonym, Synonym. I-D-E-A-S—ideas—which are all different kinds of context clues. Every word will have a different context, so you might need to vary your approach.

The way this snippet is written, let's try inference first. Then I'll rewrite the sentence a few times to show you the other methods. Okay, the "I" in ideas—Inference. We can draw conclusions from the context. If we don't know what "unconventional" means, we can take a look at the rest of the sentence or other nearby sentences to figure it out. Being unconventional seems to make Goodall different from other researchers. She hadn't yet been to college, which implies that the rest of them had. That doesn't give us a full answer, but it does tell us that she's different somehow.

So, I think that "unconventional" might mean different than what is normal. And because I'm making an inference about this word's meaning, I want to keep an eye out for it in other places to see if I can confirm or revise that working definition later.

Now, for "D"—Definition. Context clues like these will just give you the definition of the word in question. So, a good example of that would be: "She was considered somewhat unconventional among other animal researchers. She hadn't been to college yet, and this made her different." "Different and unexpected" is a great definition for the word "unconventional." This style of context clue occurs when the author expects a word to be unfamiliar to you and builds in a guide for you right there in the text.

The "E" in ideas stands for Example, and this is somewhere between inference and definition. If the author describes Goodall as unconventional, they'll go on to talk about something unconventional that Goodall did: "She was considered somewhat unconventional among animal researchers. For one thing, she hadn't been to college yet." This is very similar to that initial sentence, except for the transition phrase "for one thing," which is a way to set up examples.

Antonym—an antonym is a word whose meaning is the opposite of another word. Like how night is the opposite of day or how love is the opposite of hate. So, if there's an example in the text of what Jane Goodall was not, we can use that to figure out what she was. So, let's say the passage said: "Goodall was unconventional; she didn't conform and she wasn't ordinary." There we have two antonyms, and our answer.

Similarly, synonym just means write another word with the same meaning, similar to a definition. "Jane Goodall was unconventional; she was a non-conformist. She went against the grain."

You can see that I had to rewrite the sentences each time to apply to each context clue strategy, which shows me that you won't find all five context clues every time. You need to search for a word's meaning; you need to find the approach that makes the most sense in context. See what I did there?

And failing that, you can always look up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary. I love to do that; I think that's great! But I also feel a sense of victory when I correctly figure out what a new word means when I've put it together from context. And maybe if I'm still curious, I look it up later, and then I turn out to be right, and I'm all like, "Victory! I did it!"

Oh, and if you were curious, "glabrous" means smooth and hairless, like a leaf or the skin of a frog. "Nacreous" means shiny and rainbow-colored, like the inside of an oyster shell. And "to limb something" means to draw the outline of or to be highlighted in light. You can learn anything. David out.