Pick a CEFR level to open a specialised, distraction-free word grid. Each word is hand-picked for that level — or browse every level at once.
New Words Builder
Filter by level at any time. The target word leads each card, with its CEFR level shown as a collectible ring and a pronunciation button for our future audio engine.
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styleA1 · Everyday Word Catalog
300 essential beginner words, sorted into 15 everyday classes. Open a class for its 20 words — each with phonetics, an example sentence, instant translation into 9 languages, British audio and one-tap flashcards.
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Browse the full vocabulary library
Explore all 5,500 words as clean, level-by-topic reference lists — each with British pronunciation, example sentences and flashcards, and cross-linked to matching short stories.
Turn these words into memory: play the daily word game
Reading a word list is recognition; guessing a word letter by letter is retrieval — and retrieval is what makes vocabulary stick. Our free
English word game gives you one hidden word a day at your CEFR level, a clue after three guesses, and the full definition at the end, ready to save to your bank.
The five levels hold 5,500 words between them, and the number of words per level roughly doubles each time — 300 at A1, 600 at A2, 1,000 at B1, 1,500 at B2 and 2,100 at C1. That shape is not arbitrary. Vocabulary coverage climbs steeply at the start and then flattens: the most frequent 1,000 word families account for around three-quarters of ordinary speech, while the thousand families between 8,000 and 9,000 add a fraction of one per cent. Early words earn their place easily; later ones have to be paid for in volume.
Within each level the words are grouped into topic classes rather than listed alphabetically — 15 classes at A1, rising to 35 at C1. Grouping by topic is what makes a list learnable, because twenty related words give you enough material to say something complete about one subject, which an alphabetical run never does. The known cost is interference: learning trousers, shorts, skirt and jeans in one sitting makes them easier to confuse later. The remedy is simply to review topic sets more often than you review mixed ones, not to abandon the grouping.
How to use the builder
Every card carries the same four affordances, and they are designed to be used in this order rather than all at once.
Listen before you read
Play the British audio first and only then look at the spelling. English orthography is unreliable enough that a word learned from the page often arrives in your memory with the wrong pronunciation attached, and unlearning that later is considerably harder than getting it right the first time.
Translate, then leave the translation behind
Tap for an instant translation to attach the meaning, then work from the example sentence instead. The translation is scaffolding for the first encounter; if it is still the thing you reach for on the fifth encounter, the word has not really been learned.
Say the example with one detail changed
Read the example sentence aloud, then say it again with something swapped so that it is true about you. This is the step almost everyone skips and the one that does most of the work — it converts a word you have seen into a word you have used, and it costs about ten seconds.
Save only what you will not remember
Send the difficult words to your flashcard deck and leave the obvious ones alone. A deck of forty words you genuinely struggle with is reviewed; a deck of four hundred that includes everything you met is abandoned within a fortnight. Being selective is what keeps the review habit alive.
A routine that survives a busy week
The single most useful finding in memory research is that spacing beats massing: reviewing a word after one day, then three, then a week, then a month holds it far longer than daily review and costs a fraction of the total time. Almost everything else follows from that. Short sessions beat long ones, because a word needs somewhere between eight and a dozen separate encounters before it is genuinely yours and there is no way to compress those into one afternoon. Retrieval beats re-reading, because covering the answer and failing to recall it does more for retention than looking at the pair again. And the first five minutes of a session are better spent on yesterday's words than on new ones.
In practice that means something closer to fifteen minutes a day than two hours a weekend, and it means accepting that your review load grows as your collection does. When the review queue starts to feel heavy, the answer is to add fewer new words rather than to skip the reviews — a word reviewed is nearly free, and a word forgotten has to be learned again from the beginning.
Questions learners ask
How were these 5,500 words chosen?
By frequency first, then by topic. Each level starts from the words that actually occur most often in English at that stage of learning, and those words are then sorted into the situations they belong to rather than being presented as an alphabetical run. The order matters more than the total: the first 1,000 word families alone account for roughly three-quarters of the words in ordinary speech, so a well-ordered list goes much further than its size suggests.
How many words a day should I add?
Fewer than you would like, more often than you expect. Twenty new words a day is realistic at A1 and A2 where the words are short and concrete; ten a day is more honest at B1 and above, where each item carries collocations and register with it. What matters far more than the daily number is that you review yesterday's words before meeting today's, because relearning a forgotten word costs several times what reviewing a fading one does.
Why can I recognise a word but not use it?
Because recognition and production are separate skills, and every learner's receptive vocabulary is several times larger than their productive one. Recognising is a matter of confirming something in front of you; producing means retrieving it from nothing. The fix is to practise the harder direction: cover the English, look at the meaning, and force yourself to produce the word before checking. The effort of failing to recall is what builds the pathway.
Should I learn a word with its translation or an English definition?
Translation at A1 and A2, English definitions increasingly from B1. A direct translation is the fastest way to attach a meaning to a new form for a beginner, and the fear that it causes lasting damage is largely unfounded. It stops working around B1, where words start to differ by shade and register rather than by meaning — at that point your language usually has one word for the English three, and only an English definition can separate them.
What is the difference between this trainer and the vocabulary lists?
Same words, different jobs. This page is the interactive trainer: it plays British audio, translates on tap, and saves words to your flashcard deck. The vocabulary library pages are static, fully readable lists of the same catalogue, better for browsing a topic, revising offline or sharing a link. Most people use both — the library to see what a topic contains, the trainer to actually learn it.
Do I need an account to use this?
No. Every level, every topic and every word is free to browse, listen to and translate without signing in. An account only adds the parts that need somewhere to store data: your saved flashcard deck, which topics you have finished, and syncing both between your phone and your computer.