Vocabulary by business topic

1. How TOEIC vocabulary works

The TOEIC Listening and Reading test measures English used in international workplaces. The texts are memos, e-mails, advertisements, invoices, schedules, phone messages and short conversations between coworkers. A test taker who works in accounting will meet a conversation about a restaurant reservation; a nurse will read an e-mail about a shipping delay. For that reason, the test does not require specialist knowledge. A text about a factory will mention an assembly line, a shift or a defect, but never a technical term that only engineers would know.

This is good news for your study plan. The vocabulary of the test is wide but not deep: it covers many situations, and in each situation it uses the common, practical words that any office worker would recognize. If you know those words well, including their collocations and their word families, you will understand almost every sentence on the test.

Word lists built for the test

Researchers have measured this. Charles Browne and Brent Culligan built the TOEIC Service List (TSL), a list of about 1,200 words that appear frequently in TOEIC preparation materials, designed to be used together with the New General Service List (NGSL) of about 2,800 core English words. According to the list's authors, the NGSL and the TSL together cover about 98.5% of the words in typical TOEIC texts. Both lists are freely available under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

What does 98.5% coverage mean in practice? In a 200-word e-mail, only about three words would fall outside the two lists, and those are often names of people, products or places. In other words, a student who really knows about 4,000 well-chosen words is reading with almost no gaps. The rest of this lecture is organized by topic, because topics are how the test presents words, but every word here is common, high-value business English of the kind these lists contain.

2. How to learn words that stay

Spaced retrieval

Memory research is consistent on one point: trying to recall a word is much more effective than reading it again, and spreading those recall attempts over time works better than repeating them in one session. This is called spaced retrieval. In practice:

• Look at the English word, try to recall its meaning (or the reverse) before you check the answer.
• Review a new word after one day, then after about three days, then after a week, then after two or three weeks. Each successful recall makes the next gap longer.
• If you fail, the word goes back to a short interval. Failing is part of the process, not a sign that you are wasting your time.
• Short daily sessions (15–20 minutes) beat one long weekly session.

Noto's flashcard decks use exactly this logic. Whatever tool you use, the rule is the same: test yourself, do not just reread.

Collocations

A collocation is a group of words that native speakers naturally use together: place an order, meet a deadline, submit a proposal, heavy traffic. Part 5 and Part 6 often test collocations directly. In the sentence The supplier was unable to ------- our deadline, four verbs may all mean something like "achieve," but only meet collocates with deadline. Learn verbs with their nouns and adjectives with their nouns from the start.

Word families

Many Part 5 questions show four forms of the same word: compete, competition, competitive, competitively. The meaning is not the problem; the part of speech is. When you learn a new word, write down its most common family members and an example of each. Section 17 of this lecture gives you a practice table.

Paraphrase awareness

In Parts 3, 4 and 7, the correct answer rarely repeats the words of the conversation or the text. If a speaker says The shipment won't arrive until next week, the correct answer may read A delivery has been delayed. Wrong answers, on the other hand, often repeat a word you heard (shipment) inside an incorrect idea. Each topic unit below ends with a typical paraphrase pair so that you train yourself to match meanings, not sounds.