How do you deal with unfamiliar words?

[Kister Bless]

Reading more books which on several occasions you will find out that the same word has been used, so I try to relate it to the context of whichever book am reading to find out its meaning because of my urge to learn new languages.

[Thabang Amos]

Reading books with unfamiliar words is a great challenge for me. From a young age i have come to appreciate words that are hard or unknown as they allow me to learn and expand my Vocabulary. its a great feat and one i hugely appreciate

[Kansas City Teacher]

Good discussion! I have spent many years trying to get folks to understand what they read. As for me, I typically would search for context clues first. Then, I would break the word apart, looking for prefixes / suffixes that I either know, or that I have seen in other words. It is interesting that people who speak other languages have an advantage in this area..

If all else fails, you can look it up. This mentioned in the original poster, this will sometimes lead to a deeper understanding of the word.

[WardahEbrahim]

Sometimes I look it up, but I think I mostly put it into context, and that how I learn the meaning.

[April Ruvs]

I tend to write them down or proceed to Google them and if I like them a lot write a poem based on the word.

[cdhundley]

I used to look everything up in the dictionary. My mother would tell me, "I'm not your brain. Go look it up." So that was a very ingrained habit throughout school and college. Now, I look foreign words up with my phone right as I encounter them.

However, unfortunately, I have not recently read too many books that required me to look things up. It's a shame. I'm not a fan of unnecessarily verbose writers - those who use their vocabulary to illustrate how smart the author is, even when the language is inconsistent with the tone or the direction of the story. But a well-placed esoteric word here and there can really make a book stand out and remind me how much I enjoy the act of reading in the first place.

[rumik]

I can usually figure out the meaning based on context, and even if not, an unfamiliar word usually isn't important enough to warrant looking it up in my opinion. But if it actually seems important or I just like the sound of it, I'll definitely look it up.

[Maryjessie]

I usually use context clues to try to figure out what a word means. If that doesn't work, I look it up and read examples of its use.

[Florence Nalianya]

I usually try to read the word keenly in a sentence and that way I easily grasp the meaning. If it fails, the dictionary all the time.

[Wanja Hannah]

First of all I will try to grasp the meaning by repeatedly reading the content again and if I don't get it, my dictionary will come in handy. Thanks goodness now we have our dictionaries everywhere on the internet.

[spirituallove]

If I don't know the meaning of a word, I will try to look it up immediately, but this is also a little frustrating since it stops my flow of reading. Sometimes, if I have more or less grasped the meaning within the context of what I am reading, I will just leave it and underline it in pencil to look up the exact meaning later on. I think it is important to always expand my vocabulary and continue to learn new words.

[DD129]

I would first use context clues to define an unfamiliar word. If that doesn't help me, I'd just look it up. I like to know whats going on, and some meaning might be lost if I don't understand the unfamiliar word. Doing this has helped me expand my vocabulary and improve my writing too, so I'm not upset.

[kali09]

I love expanding my vocabulary by coming across unfamiliar words. If I come across an unfamiliar word, I immediately stop reading and look up the definition. I swear 89% of my internet history is "define ____"

[Lib -]

I agree with several of this club's members' replies to this question.

Susan Solomon
Lib -

[Inmortalbooklover]

My first language is spanish, but I almost always read in english because I prefer to read the original book rather than a translation. This is why I encounter a lot of unknown words. I normally try to guess them by the context, and when I can´t I look them up.