English vocabulary
Topic words, phrasal verbs and idioms, with exercises. Free, with no signup.
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The vocabulary game runs from A1 to C2. Three lives, five correct answers to clear a level, and points for answering fast. It takes five minutes and tells you where your vocabulary actually sits.
Play the vocabulary gameFree English vocabulary practice: topic word lists, phrasal verbs, idioms and collocations, with exercises that mark themselves.
Vocabulary is the slowest part of a language to build and the most common ceiling once technique is in place. It is also the part that rewards small daily work more than long sessions.
Topic word lists graded by level, each set with exercises.
Every level of the CEFR scale, from beginner to proficiency.
Everything below is free and marks itself where there are questions.
Six things worth knowing.
Longer lists cause words to become confused with each other, and a confused word is worse than an unknown one.
A word learned inside a sentence about your own life is remembered far better than one from a list.
Educate, education, educational, educator. Four forms take barely longer than one.
Words travel in pairs: cut emissions, raise awareness, sit an exam. A word without its partners is half learned.
Words need several encounters across weeks. Reviewing beats adding.
Vocabulary improves more slowly than anything else, so it is the wrong thing to leave until the end.
Yes, all of it. No account, no email address, no payment.
There is no official figure for any exam. Accuracy matters more than size: a smaller vocabulary used precisely scores better than a larger one used loosely.
Yes for speaking and informal writing. In formal writing, single-word equivalents usually read better.
Where free stops
Everything here is open, and for reading, listening, grammar and vocabulary that is enough: they have right answers, so you can check them yourself.
Writing and speaking are judged against criteria rather than checked against a key. If you are taking IELTS, IELTStestONLINE assesses both against the four IELTS criteria, using a system built by a former examiner and examiner trainer.
See how that works