I'd like to ask native English speakers:

Native speaker and ESL teacher here. Like someone else said, I can often guess based on context, or I can just use Google. I also believe that by FAR, one of the BEST things you can do for your vocabulary in any language is to read. Especially at the intermediate and advanced levels. I work with kids all the time who speak fluently, but are years behind in reading level and vocabulary — even students that are so advanced you wouldn’t know they’re not native speakers (I teach teenagers). But also, the education system for the country (and even more so, the area) I teach in is absolute trash, so even our native speakers are frequently functionally illiterate. Anyway, best of luck OP, and if you need reading recommendations based on your reading level, let me know! I’m passionate about language, teaching, and literacy.

Not native, but a pretty fluent speaker nonetheless, in case the area of your inquiry wasn't actually quite so decisively limited; if I encounter an unknown word in a situation where my relatively immediate reaction is required, I do my best to glean the meaning from the context and based on potentially familiar components of the otherwise unfamiliar word (sometimes it has a root similar to a known word from a different language, for example). Later, or immediately if I'm able, I simply look up the word's definition online. As for memorising in particular, I can offer little advice as, at least from my experience, it's rather easy to memorise a word just by using it or seeing/hearing it used a few times. In most situations, if it's a word you should know, you'll most likely have little trouble remembering it as that implies its relatively common usage. Also, of course, remembering meanings of words when hearing them is much easier than internalising them enough to freely remember and use them on your own, so understanding others is far easier than utilising a rich vocabulary personally; but memorising a dictionary is a poor way of achieving either goal. Just read a variety of literature, listen to a variety of people and media, make sure to look up any unknown words before you forget, and your vocabulary, both passive and active, will grow quickly enough. Of course, actually talking or even texting is still best when working on active vocabulary; for the best results, I recommend putting effort into also doing your internal dialogue in English and/or talking to yourself about your thoughts and plans in detail, internally or aloud. Might feel weird, but it's a surprisingly decent substitute for talking to others when there are few opportunities for practice, as well as an excellent supplement to actually talking to other people.

1. Context 2. Say it aloud 3. Roots

😺

It depends a little on how I see it. If I know the words around it I usually rely on their meanings to guess what the unknown word probably means. If I see it alone and have time, I look it up. It's fun to learn new words, but if you know enough of the language you can usually rely on context to fill in gaps.

I can often guess what it means by the context, especially if I hear the word a few times from different people. If I'm really curious and want to know right away, I'll look up the word on Google.

As with everything, it depends on the context. But generally, if I need to understand it, I’ll ask / check. If I can guess and don’t care, I’ll skip it and go with my understanding. If it’s a friend using a word to show their big vocabulary I’ll make fun of it etc. etc. etc. What you’d do in your first language may be a good reference if your English vocab foundation is already fairly good. Otherwise ‘how many words is enough’ really depends on your goal. If you want a high Toeic score, learn as many of the Toeic vocabulary set as you can. If you want to perform well in a given situation (dinners, presentations etc.), it’s often not vocabulary size that leads to good performance, it’s familiarity with the common words / combinations / phrases for that situation. Many of the most effective communicators I know use a fairly small language set, but they use it well.

It depends on what I’m doing at the moment. If I have time, I’ll Google the word (I do this usually when I’m reading or watching a show by myself). However, there are plenty of other times where I’ll just rely on context clues instead of looking up the word.

I’m reading an Agatha Christie story right now on Kindle. If I can’t figure it out from context clues, I highlight the word to pull up the definition. If it says it’s a “dated term,” I will be glad to now understand the sentence properly but I will certainly make no effort to remember the meaning. If it’s still in current use but not one I would personally realistically use, same thing applies.  However, if I learn of a word that defines an idea I somewhat regularly hear or speak about, I will be glad and intentionally commit it to memory. An example of this is “semantic satiation.” I delight to pull that one out when someone says “Agh! ‘Example word’ doesn’t even sound like a real word anymore! I said it so many times that it lost all meaning.”

In spoken, sometimes context tells you the meaning, but if not then it depends who I’m talking to. If I’m comfortable asking them, I will ask. However, in most of my conversations these words don’t come up. If it is in reading, I’ll just search it up.

Depends on how interesting the word is and how unclear its meaning is in context. I'll either get the jist, Google it, or busy out the dictionary.

The context around it, if its by itself, break it down, if it cant be broken down, look it up.

I look up words all the time in a dictionary. It’s so easy with the internet, smartphones, and tablets. When I read a printed book, I look up any words online that I have a question about. When I feel like going into detail, I use the full online version of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Context. For example, imagine I was trying to figure out the meaning of "ran" from a sentence like, "they ran a mile in 5 minutes." From this sentence, I can tell that 'ran' is a verb and has something to do with moving. Since a mile is hard to walk in 5 minutes, 'ran' probably doesn't mean moving slowly. So, I can guess that 'ran' means to move quickly. That said, if you're not sure, you can always just look it up on Google.

First I try to piece together the meaning of the word through context but if there isn’t enough context to piece together the meaning or the meaning could be ambiguous then I look it up. Learning new words is great and is vital to learning and understanding any language so learning the basic skill of figuring a meaning from context when used applicably is essential.

Thanks for all the reply. Appreciate it. I also want to make some friends and improve my English by this chance If you want leave a message here

I almost always look up the definition because I’m curious that way. Even if I can kind of glean the meaning from the surrounding context, I like to get a precise definition. Often, there are words I end up having to look up multiple times until it sticks. So, it’s similar to when I’m learning Spanish, just far less often.

I don’t think I’ve ever actively worked to memorize a word in English. At this point in my life I rarely encounter vocabulary I don’t know that I feel like I need to know. Usually it’s either newly minted slang, which I google, or archaic words in old books (usually related to sailing or horse transportation) that I don’t need to remember beyond having a vague awareness of the context they’re used in - knowing what a mizzen is will never make any difference in my enjoyment of what I’m reading.

If I come across a word I don’t know, I typically look it up in the dictionary

Try to use context but if I really don't know, usually it's when I'm reading so I'll either use Kindle's dictionary search function or I'll Google the word depending on the format I'm reading in.

It doesn't happen often! The last word I remember looking up is "avuncular." But if I do run across something I don't know and I have my phone on me, it's easy enough to stop and look it up.

I am a native English speaker and know a lot more words now than I did when I was 5 years old yet never learned any word lists and very rarely looked in a dictionary. I just worked out what words meant as I came across them in everyday life from the context in which they were used. This is how people, in general, learn their native language. It is also the way I learn foreign languages. I got to C1 German without memorizing word lists. I just spoke to a lot of people, read a lot of books, and watched a lot of media. I just worked out what a word meant from the context.

I almost always look up the definition of the word.

I Google words I don't know often. If I remember it, I remember it. If I don't, I'll look it up later on for whatever I'm doing/reading.

Sometimes I use context clues or see if I can find a Latin or Greek root that will help me to get the gist. If none of those things help, I use a dictionary.  My favorite word I've learned in the last year is obstreperous. 

I really like new words so unless the situation makes it impossible I look it up or ask the speaker, even if I think I can guess the meaning based on how it’s used. Most people like telling you the meaning of a word and it can spark interesting mini conversations that give more information than my context-based assumptions. If it’s a word I really like or a new concept to me, I might also look up the history of the word to try to understand more nuance about what it means and how it’s used. This is harder as a language learner though. In French and Spanish I look up words a lot, but it’s because I have to to understand what’s going on, not so much because I’m enjoying learning. I try to ask aloud in conversation when I don’t understand a word, but I’m less brave about it when not speaking English. I think it’s good for me when I do it though—if people are taking the time to talk to me they usually want to help me understand them.

Modern dictionaries have about 450k entries. If you count words with the same spelling but different origins as different words, you might increase that number by half. According to vocabulary tests I've taken, I know how to use about 40,000 of them. Not even 10%. Keep in mind several things: many English words are unique to a specific academic or technical field. Many English words are just words in another language that we stole. Many English words are specific to a region, culture, or country (e.g. most Americans won't know what a Brit means by a lorry). Many English words are archaic, slang, or occasionally both. Because of this, the average native speaker knows something like 25,000 words. I'm particularly widely-read, highly-educated, and interested in trivia and language broadly. All this to say I still sometimes encounter I don't know or am not sure about. When that happens, I just look it up in a dictionary. It's what I was taught as a kid.

I look up words all the time, usually when I'm reading. Often they are words that I'm familiar with, but suddenly I wonder if I truly understand all the possible meanings or uses, and I'm curious so I look it up. Or I get curious about the etymology of a word that I've seen and used but find myself wondering, How did that word come into the language? So I'm not creating lists of words to memorize, but I end up getting more knowledgeable about words I already know

Yes it's useful to memorize a lot of words. If you don't memorize the words you're going to remain stuck at your current level.

Look up the definition, try to figure out any related words, imagine using the word in 2-3 scenarios. Move on.

A native speaker spoken vocabulary of 10s of thousands of words. Reading extends the words by forcing to look up unknown words up in a dictionary or online. Specilised jargon you just have to google it. The approach of whole language and sight word only instructions was introduced by academics who needed to keep publishing radical theories to keep tenure from the late 1960 when they took over teacher training from Teachers Colleges where experienced teachers at the end of their career taught all they knew to the next generation. It wrought massive damage. The smarts kids could memorise enough words until they got to year 9 then their literacy couldn't be extended further without remedial teaching. Those who weren't smart and blessed with a strong memory, or had dyslexia, never became literate. The current evidence based approach is to teach the language through phonemes and phonetics where possible then teach exceptions as sight words. A native speaker of may know the word already, just not how to spell it. Teaching English as a second language is a separate skill with it's own approaches that I haven't been trained in. Because of time constraints you have to learn to understand, speak and read and write the language. You would need an ESL teacher to explain that.

I have the Miriam-Webster dictionary app so I can look up words and a vocab app that shows me new words. If a word is too obscure and not useful I won’t bother trying to remember it.

1. Guess from context. 2. Guess from the etymology of the word (knowing a bunch of prefixes and suffixes and words with a shared root gives a decent guess a lot of the time). 3. Look it up or ask someone.

As children, our parents always tell us to look a word up in the dictionary if we don't know what it means. I still do that.

I usually pay attention to the context it’s used in. After hearing it enough times I can understand what it means.

Depends on where I encounter the new word. Sometimes i can determine the meaning from context. Sometimes there is someone to ask, or perhaps the word gets defined in the text or the show I am watching. Other times i go to Google to see what comes up via the dictionary and/or Wikipedia. Back in the olden days I had to consult physical dictionaries :)

Adjacent to my previous answer: as a child, i got in trouble at school a lot for unfinished homework, and the punishment was usually a skipped recess spent having to write out lines from the dictionary. I probably encountered a lot of words that way 😂

I usually look it up. There have been times where I have guessed based on context, and then ended up thinking a word had the opposite meaning of what it actually did, so it's always better to be sure.

Language acquisition experts say you have to be exposed to a word 15 times for it to stick. This also means you happily forget words you don't see very often.

Everyone's talking about context, which is probably the most key thing, but what also helps is being very familiar with greek and latin word roots of words that very often give a a clue to what the word is about, similar being familiar with Kangxi radicals helping with inferring the general subject a Chinese character is related to when seeing it for the first time. For instance just about any medical term can be dissected into parts to figure out what it means. For example "Gastroenteritis" > "gastro" (pertaining to the stomach) > "entero" (something to do with intestines) > "itis" (inflammation). Any medical issue with "-itis" at the end is going to mean inflammation of whatever came before it. The if you saw "gastroenterologist", you can use that "gastro-entero-" and then "-ologist" is how most doctor specialist/scientist terms end. It's a doctor who specializes in the lower digestive system. Another example might be "Paleontology". Anytime you see "-ology" you know it means the study of something, or scientific field. "Paleo" is a root word meaning "ancient". Put it together and you can safely infer the word means "study of ancient life" (most associated with studying fossils but it's broader than that in practice) Another fancy word example might be "arborist". For this one you would know it pertains to trees because that's usually what any word that starts with "arbor", and "-ist" means someone who does the activity of whatever the word started with. So "arborist" is someone works with trees (which could mean a lot of things relating to trees but even natives wouldn't know specifically what the particular arborist does before they explain it to them). Then you later you might see the word "arboretum", and you know it has something to do with trees, and even if you don't know what the latin root "-etum" means you can probably glean from context it's a place. It's a tree garden. This always brings to mind a fun joke from the cartoon Futurama, where some mafia robots are discussing a union strike negotiation and a dumb robot mafia henchman asks "what if the management remains intransigent?", and the robot mafia don says "from context it's clear what you mean." (I promise you it's a clever joke). But Mafia Don-bot is right, that's an obscure word, but from just the context of the discussion we can guess it means "unwilling to compromise". However you can in theory even break up this word into "transigere" which is latin for agreement, "in-" prefix generally means a negation of something, and "-gent" at the end of a long word signals you that it's being in a particular state of what came before it. So put it together it means "state of disagreement". That's a really obscure one so you wouldn't be expected to know that, it's just an example of how words can be broken apart to extract meaning from the parts.

90% of the time, I guess what it means based on context and etymology; words are made up of parts which are almost always shared with other words. For example, if I saw the word 'antidisestablishmentarianism' for the first time, if it was in context I probably wouldn't have to look it up. I'd just break it down to understand the meaning. "anti-" (suffix, "opposed to", "not") "dis-" (suffix, "not", "undo", "reverse") "establishment" (root word) "-arian" (suffix, "proponent/supporter of an ideology") "-ism" (suffix, "ideology") From that I can guess, oh it's an ideology opposed to 'disestablishmentarianism', and what does that mean? Something about the removal or breaking down of 'the establishment'. Establishment of what? In context, I would learn what it is, in this case it is the establishment of the church as an official state religion. But to be able to do this, you have to already know lots of words and etymological patterns, so I do recommend trying to memorize new words wherever possible.

Context first. If I hear it in a sentence I'll usually infer the meaning. If I still don't get it and have the time to think about it I might break the word down and think about the possible etymology. Similar sounding words can help guess the meaning. I did that more often back before smart phones.

Just google it. Especially if I'm on my computer or phone, because it takes like three seconds. Make sure you find an online dictionary, and not the AI result.

I either deduce the meaning from context or if that doesn't work, I look it up. Come to think of it, I usually look it up anyway just to be sure that what I think the words means is what it really means.

If it piques my interest, immediately check the definition and pronunciation in Merriam-Webster. Google if it's an idiom.

I carry a dictionary in my bag but, then again, I'm a massive nerd usually it's possible to guess from context and if not, you can filter out prefixes, suffixes and infixes consider options for the component morphemes, find the meaning of those assemble word back together consider the famous word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and its morphemes pneumono - lung ultra microscopic - very small silico - silicon volcano - self-evident from word coni - dust osis - a condition of sth. put it all together, 'a lung condition from inhalation of very small silicon dust' if that doesn't work, I ask or look it up in my dictionary

Grab a dictionary, or ask if one isn’t handy

Sometimes it depends on the word. A word like "intercontinental" can have its meaning guessed because of the structure of the word itself ("inter" means between, "continental" means about continents). Some words cannot be guessed so easily like "ombudsman" (a person who reads complaints) simply because they don't use common prefixes and suffixes. These are words like that I tend to look up after reading them.

I either guess based on context, or look it up—wiktionary is my dictionary of choice. That being said, some new words have rather transparent meanings to native speakers, like chronocentrism, contradistinguish, pluralistic, &c, which most can comprehend accurately even upon reading them for the first time.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I am a native Dutch speaker and the way I handle new words in Dutch and English is the same. Often I'm able to use context clues to understand the meaning of the word. If I can't figure out what it means then it depends whether the word is important for the story or not. If it is not important then I'll just pretend like I know it and move on with my life. And if it is important then I'll ask what it means or I'll look it up. When I look it up I almost always do this in the same language. I hardly ever look up a translation

Search up the meaning. The following days, I try to use the word as much as I can so it kinda sticks in my vocabulary. If the meaning itself is very specific and I’m likely not gonna use it again, I wont

Going beyond inferring the meaning from context, I learned a lot of vocabulary in my teen years reading digitally. I used kindle, but any app that has a built in dictionary will do. Removing even the friction from googling a word (and taking yourself out of the story) let's you pick up unfamiliar words that you literally just saw used in context.

When I was younger I would try to pick things up from context. Now it’s less common for me to come across a (non-technical) work I don’t already know, so I look them up.

Most words can be guessed by context (it helps that I read a lot of books as a kid so my vocabulary is quite wide) - and I look up any words I don’t know online. I’d say the more words you do memorise, the easier it will be to figure out the meanings of words you don’t know.

Sometimes it’s obvious. If it’s a truly new word I’ll look it up. More often, it’s a familiar word being used in a strange new way. That, we look up on UrbanDictionary.

I Google it! It's actually fairly common for me to run into words I've never heard before (or in contexts that I didn't know what they meant) in books. I read Emma recently (a 19th century classic by Jane Austin) and there was plenty of vocabulary I had to look up. I wouldn't say I'm trying to memorise it though - I'm unlikely to need to remember that a "brougham" is a kind of carriage! - but I love the language and it's fun to learn new things. And if any of it sticks, I'm even happier! :)

If I'm truly stuck I'll just google it and find the first relevant dictionary link. Most of the time you can work out the word meaning from context, however, or at least get a somewhat firm grasp. A lot of the words have common roots with words already known, so you look for parts that already make sense. For example, anything with the aqua-prefix is likely to do with water, so if I see the word "aquarelle" in the context of drawing or painting I can infer it has something to do with watercolours. As another example, Biblioklept has the biblio- prefix which relates to books or libraries, and "klept" often has to do with money, stealing or wealth (kleptocracy, kleptomania). You can therefore infer that there is something to do with books and money or theft. A lot of this comes from understanding the Greek and Latin origin of words, for example, "Colonel", which often throws 2nd language speakers, has its roots in the Latin "Columna", but went through Italian and French variation before becoming English, giving it a very non-standard pronunciation against spelling. English natives learning, for example, German often complain that German just mashes a bunch of words together to make new words, but of course English does the exact same, for example "Locksmith", a person who makes or opens locks is a combination of "Lock," a device used to prevent something from opening, and "Smith" a person who creates something, often of metal. I feel like once you "understand" this sketch you probably know enough about how words are used to get an impression of how natives interpret words: [https://youtu.be/PuDquo76490](https://youtu.be/PuDquo76490)

I’m not a native speaker, but think about your native language. Can you say you know all the words in it? That means we don’t need to know every word in English, either.

I'd consult the dictionary. So that I can understand it properly. Then it becomes internalised for me.

I look it up in the dictionary. Usually I use this one: Wiktionary.org Sometimes this one: Dictionary.com And sometimes a very large hardcover one that I have on a shelf in my bedroom. I read the definition, etymology, and example sentences so I can really understand what the word means and have a better chance of 1.) understanding it without looking it up next time, and 2.) understanding similar words by recognizing their root words.

I always, always, make a point of looking up any word I encounter that I don't know. I've done this since my schooldays and I'm now 69. I read a novel in which the author described something as 'calid'. I didn't know what it meant so I looked it up. Now I know. That's how one learns.

As a non-native speaker, I'll just give one unsolicited piece of advice. If you decide to look up the word, PLEASE don't translate it to your native language, but look up its definition in English. Translation is only ok if you're a complete beginner and still you should move away from it as soon as possible. I've seen so many people memorize a word translation and think it means exactly the same thing and is used exactly the same way. (It is only for a small fraction of words) It's also a good way to expand your vocabulary even further if you don't understand some words in the definition and google them too. Although, definitions usually have multiple explanations so you can still get the word meaning from the ones you understand

1. Look for context 2. Look it up 3. Try to figure out a base word to help with the meaning

If I can’t figure it out based on context I Google it.