Money & Finance — B1 English Vocabulary

Using money & finance words in English

Financial vocabulary is worth a careful pass because several of these words are false friends or hide a second meaning. Interest is the clearest case: the same word covers curiosity and the money a bank charges, and only one of those can be counted. Profit and benefit look interchangeable and are not. And debt carries a silent b that almost every learner pronounces at least once.

What to watch out for

• Interest has two meanings and one is uncountable

  The money a loan costs is interest, always uncountable and with no article: The loan charges 5% interest. Curiosity is also interest, but there you can say an interest in history. There is a third countable use in business — a controlling interest in the company, meaning a share. Context separates them cleanly, but the countability changes with the meaning.

• Profit is money; benefit is advantage

  Profit is what remains after costs: The company made a profit of two million. Benefit is any advantage, financial or not: the benefits of exercise. In British English benefits also means state welfare payments — on benefits — which is a third meaning worth knowing. Note the verb pattern: you benefit from something, and you profit from it too, but profit as a verb is far rarer.

• Invest in, in debt, and the silent b

  The prepositions are fixed: invest in property, be in debt, get into debt, pay off a debt. Debt is pronounced with no b at all, rhyming with bet — the letter is a spelling fossil. Also worth separating: income is all the money you receive, salary is what a professional is paid monthly, and wage is usually paid weekly or hourly.

Words learners mix up

Three tables: the words for money arriving and money leaving, four verbs whose prepositions are fixed, and the ladder that runs from wealthy down to broke.

Collocations that sound natural

Six words that live inside fixed phrases. The individual words are already familiar at this level; the phrases are what make a description of money sound like English.

• savings

  dip into your savingsa savings accountlife savingssavings are

  Plural only in this sense, so the verb after it is plural: my savings are gone. British English keeps the s in a savings account, and dip into means to start spending money you had meant to keep.

• charity

  give to charitya charity shopcharity worka registered charity

  Uncountable when it means giving — they collect for charity — and countable when it names an organisation. A charity shop is the British name for what American English calls a thrift store.

• insurance

  take out insurancean insurance policytravel insuranceclaim on your insurance

  Uncountable, so it never follows an; the countable unit is a policy. You take out insurance to buy it and claim on it to use it, and neither verb can be replaced by make or do.

• currency

  foreign currencythe local currencya strong currencychange currency

  Countable when it names one country’s money and uncountable in change currency. Beware change as a noun, which in a shop means the coins handed back to you rather than the act of swapping money.

• worth

  worth a fortuneworth doingwell worth itnet worth

  It behaves almost like a preposition: an amount or an -ing form has to follow it directly, so it is worth reading and never worth to read. Well worth it is the standard way of saying the effort paid off.

• inflation

  rising inflationthe rate of inflationbring inflation downinflation hits five per cent

  Uncountable and article-free: inflation is rising. The verbs around it are all directional — it rises, falls or is brought down — and British writing spells per cent as two words where American writing joins them.

See the full B1 collocations list →

Where each word belongs

Seven words with a shape, a country or a lookalike attached. Financial English is unusually full of near-twins, and picking the wrong twin is very visible on the page.

• economicOne letter from economicalEconomic is about the economy: economic growth, economic policy. Economical means it does not waste money or fuel, as in an economical car. Both come from economy, which has its own second sense — the cheap seats on an aeroplane.
• amountUncountable nouns onlyUse amount with what you cannot count and number with what you can: the amount of money but the number of coins. This is among the most frequent errors in writing at this level and one of the easiest to fix, because the test is simply whether the noun can take a plural.
• bankruptFormal · a state with a processYou go bankrupt or are declared bankrupt. It is an adjective in ordinary use rather than a verb, and the noun is bankruptcy. For merely having nothing left this week, the word is broke.
• assetWriting · business and figurativeAnything of value a person or company owns, normally used in the plural. It also has a warm figurative sense about people — she is a real asset to the team — which turns up constantly in references and appraisals.
• fundVerb, noun, and a plural of its ownAs a verb it means to pay for something, usually passive: the project is funded by the council. The singular noun is a pot of money for one purpose, while the plural funds simply means money available, as in we lack the funds.
• taxCountable and uncountableUncountable when it means the money in general — pay tax, income tax — and countable when it names one particular charge, as in a new tax on plastic. British English says tax return for the annual form and the taxman informally for the authority itself.
• valuableWorth money, or worth havingIt covers both price and usefulness: a valuable painting and valuable advice. Its opposite is worthless, not invaluable — invaluable confusingly means extremely valuable, one of the few English prefixes that intensifies instead of reversing.

Sentences to try

Four frames with the fixed prepositions. Adapt each one to a real financial situation you can describe.

• They decided to invest in property rather than shares.
• The company made a profit for the first time in three years.
• He is in debt because the interest on the loan is high.
• Her monthly income barely covers her expenses.

Questions about money & finance vocabulary