Passive and active vocabulary: why you understand more words than you use

Most people understand far more words than they ever use. You probably know what "meticulous" or "ubiquitous" means when you see it, but how often do you actually say it? That gap is normal, and it has a name.

Two kinds of vocabulary

Your passive vocabulary, also called receptive, is the words you understand when you read or hear them. Your active vocabulary, also called productive, is the words you can come up with yourself when you speak or write.

The passive one is always bigger, for native speakers as much as for learners. Recognising a word only takes a rough idea of what it means. Using it takes much more: you have to remember it at the right moment, know how to spell and pronounce it, know which words it goes with, and judge whether it fits the situation.

Knowing a word comes in degrees

It's easier to think of a scale than of two boxes. For any word, you might be at one of these points:

• You've seen it before, but you don't know what it means.
• You'd understand it in a sentence, thanks to the context.
• You know what it means even on its own.
• You can use it yourself, correctly and without thinking too hard.

Most of the words you know sit somewhere in the middle. A word moves up the scale each time you meet it, and especially each time you use it.

Why the gap is bigger in a second language

Most learners meet English far more often than they produce it. They read, listen, watch and study, and speak or write much less. So their passive vocabulary grows faster than their active one.

That's why it's so common to understand a TV series in English and still struggle to find simple words in a conversation. It isn't a sign that something is wrong. It just means you've had more practice understanding than speaking.

What a vocabulary test measures

Tests like ours measure your passive vocabulary. You tick the words whose meaning you know, which shows how many words you'd understand when reading or listening. Active vocabulary is much harder to measure, because you'd need to see which words someone actually uses over time.

So your result is the number of words you understand, not the number you'd use in a conversation. For almost everyone, the second number is a good deal smaller.

Moving words from passive to active

The way to make a word active is to use it. A few things help:

• When you review words, go from the meaning to the English word, not only the other way round. That's the direction you need when you speak.
• Write. A few sentences a day, messages or comments in English give you time to search for the right word, which makes it easier to find next time.
• Speak, even if it's just describing your day out loud to yourself.
• Learn the phrase a word comes in, not only the word itself. There's more on this in 7 ways to learn English vocabulary faster.

A large passive vocabulary isn't wasted. It's what makes reading and listening easy, and it's the pool your active vocabulary grows from.

Further reading: Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.