IELTS academic vocabulary

Academic words are the vocabulary that appears across many subjects rather than in one topic. They are especially important for IELTS Reading, where passages are written in an academic style, and for Writing Task 2, where formal vocabulary helps your argument sound precise. This deck draws on the New Academic Word List, which was built from a large collection of university texts.

The words here fall into a few useful groups. Some describe research and reasoning: empirical, hypothesis (see the science deck), inference, validity, methodology, paradigm and correlation. Others help you frame and connect ideas: aspect, domain and scenario, and linking words such as namely, thereby and essentially. A third group describes quantity and change: distribution, magnitude, threshold, variance, intensity and transformation.

Many of these words are formal, so use them where they fit naturally. In an essay, "The impact of social media on young people is significant" is clearer than an over-complicated sentence packed with rare words. Choose the one academic word that says exactly what you mean: facilitate (make easier), obtain (get), precede (come before), initiate (start), inhibit (hold back). Each of these can replace a vaguer phrase and lift your Lexical Resource score.

Watch for word families. Explicit and explicitly, comparative and comparable, diverse and diversity, evident and evidence all behave differently in a sentence. When you learn a card, look at the part of speech on the back and try one short sentence with it. The example sentences, where available, show natural collocations such as "have an impact on" and "obtain permission".