Word Families

Words often come in families. You can expand your vocabulary by becoming familiar with these word families and this can also enable you to become a more fluent speaker and writer of English. If you know all the possible words within a word family, you can express yourself in a wider range of ways. For example, if you know the verb and the noun forms related to the adjective boring, you can say:

In the list below, the words in bold are words that are very common and important to learn. The other wordsin the same row are words in the same family, often formed with prefixes and suffixes. Sometimes they are just a different part of speech, for example anger, which is a noun and a verb). All the words in this list have entries in the dictionary except for some beginning with un-, im-, in- or ir-, or ending with -ly or -ily, where the meaning is always regular. Sometimes words in a word family can have meanings that are very different from others in the group, so you should always check in the dictionary if you are not sure of the meaning.