You know that feeling when you're reading

and you see a word you've never seen before

and you don't really know how

to figure out what it means?

Well, that's what we're talking about today:

strategies for figuring out new words through context.

You're always going to be encountering new words.

At the time of this recording, I'm 31

and I run into new and confusing words every day.

I read a lot and it's always a fun challenge

to run into words like, I don't know,

glabrous or limned or nacreous.

I know a lot about language

and even I have trouble figuring out

what those words mean on their own.

So it's important to rely on context,

the language that surrounds the word.

Let's say you're reading a text

and you come across a sentence

that has a word in it you don't recognize.

Here's a bit from a passage

about the famous chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall.

"Jane Goodall arrived at Tanzania's

"Gombee Stream National Park in 1960.

"She was considered somewhat unconventional

"among other animal researchers.

"After all, she had not yet been to college."

So let's pause on unconventional.

What does that word mean?

Well, let me give you some ideas,

that's the memory aid I use to keep it straight.

IDEAS, it stands for inference, definition,

example, antonym, synonym, I-D-E-A-S, IDEAS,

which are all different kinds of context clues.

Every word will have a different context,

so you might need to vary your approach.

The way this snippet is written let's try inference first,

then I'll rewrite the sentence a few times

to show you the other methods.

Okay, the I in IDEAS, inference.

We can draw conclusions from the context.

If we don't know what unconventional means,

we can take a look at the rest of the sentence

or other nearby sentences to figure it out.

Being unconventional seems to make Goodall

different from other researchers.

She hadn't yet been to college

which implies that the rest of them had.

That doesn't give us a full answer

but it does tell us that she's different somehow.

So I think unconventional might mean

different than what is normal.

And because I'm making an inference

about this word's meaning I wanna keep an eye out for it

in other places to see if I can confirm

or revise that working definition later.

D - definition.

Context clues like these will just give you

the definition of the word in question.

So a good example of that would be:

"She was considered somewhat unconventional

"among other animal researchers.

"She hadn't been to college yet,

"and this made her different and unexpected."

Different and unexpected is a great definition

for the word unconventional.

This style of context clue occurs

when the author expects a word to be unfamiliar

to you and builds in a guide for you

right there in the text.

The E in IDEAS stands for example,

and this is somewhere between inference and definition.

If the author describes Goodall as unconventional,

they'll go on to talk about something unconventional

that Goodall did.

"She was considered somewhat unconventional

"among animal researchers.

"For one thing, she hadn't been to college yet."

So this is very similar to that initial sentence,

except for the transition phrase for one thing,

which is a way to set up examples.

Antonym - an antonym is a word whose meaning is

the opposite of another word, like how night is

the opposite of day, or how love is the opposite of hate.

So if there's an example in the text

of what Jane Goodall was not,

we can use that to figure out what she was.

So let's say the passage said:

"Goodall was unconventional.

"She didn't conform, and she wasn't ordinary."

There we have two antonyms and our answer.

Similarly, synonym just means write another word

with the same meaning similar to a definition.

"Jane Goodall was unconventional.

"She was a nonconformist.

"She went against the grain."

You can see that I had to rewrite the sentences each time

to apply to each context clue strategy,

which shoes me that you won't find

all five context clues every time you need

to search for a word's meaning.

You need to find the approach

that makes the most sense in context.

See what I did there, ah huh?

And failing that, you can always look up

an unfamiliar word in a dictionary.

I love to do that.

I think that's great, but I also feel a sense of victory

when I correctly figure out what a new word means,

when I've put it together from context.

And maybe if I'm still curious, I look it up later

and then I turn out to be right,

and I'm all like "Victory at sea, I did it!"

Oh, and if you were curious,

glabrous means smooth and hairless

like a leaf or the skin of a frog.

Nacreous means shiny and rainbow colored

like the inside of an oyster shell.

And to limn something means to draw the outline of

or to be highlighted in light.

You can learn anything, David out.