The 'Featured Vocabulary, Grammar Focus, & Language Note(s)' Box: An Introduction

Each article includes a Featured Vocabulary, Grammar Focus, and Language Note(s) Box.

Featured Vocabulary:

• listed in alphabetical order
• Sustainable ESL Lexicon: these words will be listed in the Sustainable ESL Lexicon (which we may publish one day)
• Basic ESL: these words are identified as important and/or frequently-occurring English words in well-regarded ESL Learner dictionaries (e.g., Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary's Oxford 3000™ list, Macmillan Dictionary's "red words" marked with *, **, or ***)
  
• Academic Word List: these words are listed on the Academic Word List (for more information, visit here)
  
• Other: all other featured vocabulary
  
• The word class of each target word is provided. [See below for details.]
  
• If relevant, information about word pattern is provided. [See below for details.]

Grammar Focus: specific grammar issue or issues.

Language Note(s) [if necessary]: an explanation about some specific aspect of a target word.  For instance, a word may be figurative or informal, or considered offensive or old-fashioned.

Word Class

Information about a target word's word class (e.g., noun, verb, adjective, adverb, quantifier, ...) is provided.

Nouns that are countable (i.e., N-COUNT) are listed in their singular form, followed by their plural form (i.e., pl-n).

Verbs are listed in their base form, followed by the second person singular, present participle and past participle forms.

Gerunds [also known as verbal nouns] are identified as uncountable nouns (i.e., N-UNCOUNT).

Word Patterns

Sometimes some additional information is provided about word patterns: E.g., sustainability (N-UNCOUNT) (oft the N of n) For instance, "the sustainability of wind energy ..."

pl: plural | Example: pl-n = noun in the plural
sing: singular | Example: sing-n = noun in the singular
supp: supplementary information accompanying a noun
usu: usually | Example: N-COUNT usu sing