100 ENGLISH WORDS TO IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH

The American Heritage Dictionaries usually feature some 70,000 entries. They are excellent dictionaries that we strongly recommend in their different versions.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is an American English dictionary produced by the Boston publisher, Houghton Mifflin. The first edition was published in 1969. James Parton, the owner of the history magazine, American Heritage, did not agree with the permissiveness of the third edition of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961). In his opinion it was reluctant to defend “standard English”. This is an exciting topic to be discussed in another post. Nevertheless, for many of us, the “Webster” has been a veritable mine of knowledge and continues to enjoy our appreciation.

In November 2011, the highly anticipated fifth edition of The American Heritage® Dictionary of the Language was published. It contains 10,000 words and new meanings and more than 4,000 spectacular full-colour images, as well as updated contributions from the famous American Heritage® Usage Panel (https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html), a team of experts and scholars who have reviewed thousands of definitions and updated geographical entries and maps. A real gem!

And among this vast amount of information, the publishers have chosen the 100 words that any American high school student should know to feel at ease in English. A fun way to test our knowledge of English! Here’s the list:

zeal

In a future post, we will explore whether there is a similar list in Spanish and check if there are “matches” in both languages, i.e. if they repeat in English and Spanish.

A clue to test your linguistic competence. According to this study, the easiest word would be WEATHER and the hardest APLOMB.
Would you agree?

Sirk Translations.